Simone: A Novel - Softcover

Eduardo Lalo is a writer, essayist, artist, and photographer from Puerto Rico. He is the author of twelve books, including Los Países Invisibles, and, most recently, El Deseo del Lápiz.

“Grounded in a convincing existential weariness and genuine psychological suspense.” (John Williams New York Times)

“Ah, love: if it didn’t end badly, it wouldn’t end at all, especially for two star-crossed lovers in modern-day Puerto Rico. . . . A bleak but emotionally resonant work that finds weighty things to say about writing, culture, Puerto Rican identity, and the dangers of projecting one’s desire upon another. . . . This is a very eerie bit of fiction which is erotic without being romantic, psychically raw without collapsing into ennui, and linguistically expressive while using characters that live and breathe and cry right on the page. . . . The book’s human hearts ring true in the end. Like the song says, you can’t always get what you want.” (Kirkus Reviews)

“The streets of San Juan come alive in this sparkling literary tale of love and obsession. . . . Lalo’s other novels have yet to appear in English, but one hopes that will change after the release of this book; his work will find an appreciative audience in those seeking mystery and an acute attention to language.” (Publishers Weekly)

“A digressive but provocative interlude between several characters that discusses the values of Spanish and Spanish-American literature and highlights the lack of respect for Puerto Rican letters. . . . This is Lalo’s only novel translated into English and represents a valiant attempt to capture fame for one of the undeservedly ignored areas of Latin America. . . . The omnipresent San Juan setting . . . symbolizes Puerto Rico as an invisible land just as the protagonist's anonymity symbolizes his invisibility.” (Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State College Library Journal)

“Simone is reminiscent of Albert Camus’s 1942 masterpiece, The Stranger, a study in alienation and impotence. . . .  Certainly a thought-provoking book. The descriptions of Li’s abysmal circumstances—she lives practically in servitude—shed light on an almost unknown aspect of Puerto Rican reality. We are far more used to reading about the plight of Puerto Ricans in New York than about minorities in San Juan. Lalo’s dark portrayal of a sunny Caribbean city turns the conventional urban novel on its head, and his characters’ blistering condemnation of the book industry and the notion of Hispanic unity is bound to raise eyebrows. . . . Lalo’s distinct perspectives make Simone a surprising adventure and a worthwhile read.” (Bárbara Mujica, Georgetown University Washington Independent Review of Books)

“Cleverly addictive. . . . The translation by Frye is seamless.” (Charles R. Larson CounterPunch)

"Beautiful. . . . To Frye’s credit, Simone never feels like a translation. . . . While the narrator obviously has significant pride in his Puerto Rico, it inevitably comes with a concomitant sense of resentment—part of the dark shadow that follows this novel sentence-by-sentence. Upon seeing the name ‘Colony Economy’ on a carton of milk in a coffee shop, the narrator muses about how Puerto Rico’s history ‘overwhelms and defines’ him. It is an apt lens through which to view Simone—characters who cannot quite escape the world they were born into, or the childhoods they were subjected to, a country shackled by the past and every extension of happiness undercut by sorrow.” (Greg Walklin Necessary Fiction)

"This is ultimately a story about love as language, historical retribution as language, feeling itself as language. Perhaps this is why the book is, at its core, an argument, even a challenge: to bypass a country’s literature is to also ignore its history, its people, its love and its pain, and to care about them is to read them." (Sarah Neilson Full Stop)

“Lalo explores the intersection of art and pain in this gorgeously written novel about two outsiders, drawn to one another by a desire to use art as a surrogate for emotional intimacy. . . . Simone is a novel of mysteries. . . . Underlying the novel’s mysteries is Lalo’s exploration of the symbiotic relationship between art and suffering. Art is not a panacea for pain . . . . Rather, pain nourishes art. . . . But by the novel’s close the writer understands that his relationship with Li cannot be sustained without the two sharing their deepest pain and vulnerabilities, an intimacy that cannot be created through art alone.” (Lori Feathers Rain Taxi)

“Although at turns a passionate love story and a political and social commentary on life in Puerto Rico, Lalo’s Simone primarily concerns writing: the singular word that he uses as the first sentence of his novel. The sparse narrative unflinchingly depicts two lonely and uncertain lovers as they meet and try to make sense of their pains through writing.” (World Literature Today)