Simone: A Novel

Set in Puerto Rico and translated from the Spanish. The main character is a 30-ish male, a writer and professor. He’s unattached but has an on-again off-again relationship with a woman who has a kid by another man. Suddenly, perhaps through his writing, he attracts an admirer who stalks him. He assumes correctly that it’s a woman who leaves him cryptic coded notes saying things like “Hi, I’m Lena,” but signing the note ‘Simone.’ He gets notes in his mailbox, under his office and apartment doors, by email, phone messages, flyers taped to his car, notes in books in bookstores, chalked messages on the sidewalk. He starts to become as obsessed with his stalker as she is with him, but there is a bit of humor because he can’t always tell what a coded message from her is and what is just an ad or random graffiti. But pretty early on she stops the game and introduces herself to him.She is a young woman of Chinese ethnicity living in Puerto Rico. So we enter an ethnic world within an ethnic world, with its own rules, traditions and expectations. She’s a waitress and an artist and they begin a “random art” campaign, posting anonymous art works around the city. The little plot there is revolves around these two lonely people from different cultures dancing around each other, like a couple of octopi reaching out in the dark. (And one of the characters turns out to be bisexual as well.)The book has no chapters, and at times comes across as a series of disconnected paragraphs of random, but worthwhile thoughts. A lot is about Puerto Rico as in limbo between nation and colony. (Which, with its unusual American Commonwealth status, it is.) The main character compares Puerto Rico to Spain from his time in Madrid. Puerto Rico he thinks is or was “…a stop on an empire’s bus route.” Some more thoughts to give an idea of the literary quality of the writing:“For many years, I thought what I missed the most about Europe were the cafes, he said. But when I had a chance to go back there, after a ton of years, I found that even those no longer held up to my memories of them. … Europe, the Europe you have in your head, which is basically an invention of literature, may have once existed…”“My life has passed me by in this ‘Colonial Economy,’ rehearsing the coffee ritual as if it were some kind of barrier against a torrent of history that overwhelms me and defines me. What is left of the men and women of this country? What remains but the coffee and the centuries, ground down and percolated, flowing through steel tubes, pouring from plastic spigots?”“Most of what’s called depression consists of store-bought feelings…. Our emotions pop off the assembly line, you can pick them up anywhere. There’s a mass distribution network. Like so many other things we buy and sell, they’re cheap knockoffs. They exist because we adopt specific ways of being and feeling to face specific events.”“A curious phenomenon: if I don’t jot down a memory or an idea, it loses all its power, as if the substance of the thought had dried up, leaving it forever inert. It’s as if I could only discern life through ink.”“I’ve reread The Stranger after many years, focusing on Camus’s use of the sun. Meursault, the protagonist, authentically perceives things the way someone suffering from too much sun would, someone who’d even kill because of it. His is not the tourist’s sun; there’s no paradise here. His sun is simply what one has to endure day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. It heightens poverty, despondency, the neighbors’ shouting.”Of an obscure local book by an unknown author, he notes: “It is also clear that the book was written to be read by no one, merely to exist.”There is one interesting extended discussion/argument about Spanish literature that takes place between two Puerto Rican writers/professors and a visiting writer/lecturer from Spain. It revolves around a thesis: Latin American has taken over the literary title in Spanish language literature from Spain. It makes me think this may be true: If someone asked me to name great modern Spanish language writers it’s easy to come up with New World writers like Marquez, Borges, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Cortazar, Isabel Allende, Roberto Bolano, Octavio Paz, Neruda. Is Spain still riding on Cervantes and Unamuno? Carlos Ruiz Zafron?A good read; relatively short, some humor, a few surprises and it kept my attention.

This is a well written novel and I enjoyed being back in San Juan and walking around the town with Mr. Lalo. There are many ideas in this book but the novel isn't weighed down by them.

I cannot even open the book...