Eduardo Lalo’s first novel,
Uselessness, is the University of Chicago Press’s
free e-book for August. We follow our narrator through his romantic and intellectual awakenings in Paris, where he elevates his adopted home over the moribund one he has left behind. But as he falls in and out of love he comes to realize that as a Puerto Rican, he will always be apart. Ending the greatest romance of his life—that with the city of Paris itself—he returns to San Juan and his lifelong task to discover the use (or uselessness) of literature and writing. Enter your e-mail address
HERE and click “Get E-book.” You will receive an e-mail confirmation with a link to download your free e-book.
“In this dreamy and succinct novel, Lalo takes readers on an intimate journey of companionship abroad.… Set between glowing, literary Paris, the deceptively dangerous Spanish coast, and various humble San Juan apartments, Uselessness is a novel of modern plight that’s brimming with hope and wisdom.”—Booklist
Discover
Uselessness free in August.
Uselessness
A NOVEL
EDUARDO LALO
208 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2017
The streets of Paris at night are pathways coursing with light and shadow, channels along which identity may be formed and lost, where the grand inflow of history, art, language, and thought—and of love—can both inspire and enfeeble. For the narrator of Eduardo Lalo’s
Uselessness, it is a world
… Read More
Christina Soto van der Plas | Los Angeles Review of Books
“Lalo’s style is often melancholic and serious, marked by sentences that read like short breaths . . . . But it can also be generous, offering the reader a vast array of sensorial images contained in the surgical precision of barely a few words. One of the achievements of the translation of Uselessness by Suzanne Jill Levine is that it manages to capture this atmosphere.”
Booklist
“In this dreamy and succinct novel, Lalo takes readers on an intimate journey of companionship abroad. . . . This book is an important exploration of the Latin American experience in Europe. Despite confounding personal debacles, the most difficult notion for the narrator to comprehend is the enduring spirit of colonialism in the present day. Set between glowing, literary Paris, the deceptively dangerous Spanish coast, and various humble San Juan apartments, Uselessness is a novel of modern plight that’s brimming with hope and wisdom.”
Rachel Cordasco | BookRiot
“Exploring the themes of love, isolation, and intellectual maturation, Uselessness will resonate with anyone who has fallen in love with Paris and its extravagant promises of romance and fulfillment.”
Ross Posnock, Columbia University
“What a powerful, bleak, and moving novel. It dwells on things—human insignificance, disappointment, compromise, failure—that most books only gesture at.”
xx
Post Views: 241
