The Museum of Useless Efforts (European Women Writers) Paperback – April 1, 2001

Great book

I first read the short story "The Museum of Useless Efforts" in college, as part of a class about Latin American literature. That was about ten years ago and I have never forgotten that story. It's the kind of story that lingers in your mind. (I disagree with the translation of the phrase "esfuerzos inutiles" into "useless efforts" and I think it should have been translated into English as "lost causes," so I'm just going to refer to it as "The Museum of Lost Causes.") In that story, a woman finds a mysterious museum where libraries are trying to document every failed attempt, or "lost cause," that humanity has ever undertaken, for example, exploratory voyages where everyone on the ship ended up dead. It's a ridiculously large amount of work to catalog all of humanity's failures, so the big unanswered question of the story is "Why?" Why would you go to all that trouble? Wouldn't it be depressing to surround yourself with stories of failures, all day, all the time? What's the point?As a semi-depressed person, I've tried a lot of things in my life that didn't work out. My life didn't turn out the way I wanted it to, and there were many days when I felt like my life was an exercise in futility. I've made a lot of changes and tried a lot of new things while trying to improve my life, and every time something doesn't work out, I remember this story and I actually feel a little bit better. If I start a project and never finish it, I might drily think to myself, "Well, I guess I'll add that to the museum of lost causes." According to my own interpretation of the story, I think the big elephant in the room, the "why" of the story, is essentially faith in humanity. I think the librarians who are cataloging everything are doing it because they respect the people who failed and they see an inherent value in their actions. A lot of the people who failed were brave, and well-meaning, and their heart was in the right place. And a lot of them are dead, so the librarians can't express affection for them directly. All they can do is honor them through remembrance. The librarian in the story never says this directly; she never talks her beliefs or her values. But the way I interpret the story, I see the librarian's devotion to the library as expressing her values through actions rather than words. Through her actions, she wordlessly saying, "It is better to fail than to never try at all," and "humanity is better off because some people took risks, even if they ended in disaster." As a pessimistic person, this story is like therapy to me. It's sometimes hard to believe that I will succeed at something, but it's easier to have faith in myself when I remember that it's better to be brave, and fail, than to never try. And if you look at the big picture, the entire Museum of Lost Causes could be seen as a lost cause because it has almost no visitors. What's the point of a library that has almost no visitors? But the libraries continue their devotion to the library because they believe their efforts are inherently meaningful, even if they have almost no impact. As someone who continually questions whether something is meaningful or not based on its impact, this kind of philosophy helps me think about things in a different way; I still that the impact of human behavior matters more than anything else, but that is now tempered by the belief that a lot of well-intentioned behaviors are still meaningful even if they have very little impact. If you send a message that you care about other humans, and you tell that you appreciate them, then that still matters in an intangible way, even if their actual impact is negligible or unmeasurable.With that said, while I think the author is a genius, her stories aren't for everyone. If you like fast-paced stories, you will hate this. A lot of her stories are subtle, weird, and somewhat avant-garde. But when this author is mysterious, it's for a reason. Her stories are written in such a way that you, the reader, are supposed to do your own thinking and draw your own conclusions. That's what makes a great artist great. If the author told you what to think, the story would be contrived and forgettable. But if the story gives you space to think for yourself, and engage with the text, and ask questions and wonder about it, then your mind will circle back to it over the years as you grow and connect it to your life. That's what I did, and I don't regret it. In fact I mainly just feel sorry for all the English speakers who might have enjoyed stories like this, but who will probably never read them because the short story format isn't fashionable, or because Americans are just generally underexposed to works in translation. I intend to read other books by Cristina Peri Rossi just because of that one story, and I highly recommend that other English speakers give her a chance.

"The Museum of Useless Efforts" is a marvelous collection of short stories by Cristina Peri Rossi, a writer from Uruguay who has lived in exile in Spain. The stories have been translated into English by Tobias Hecht. There are 30 short pieces in this collection; a good number of them are in the 3 to 6 page length range.Many of Peri Rossi's stories are surreal or absurd. Some have subtle comic touches. Although her work invites comparison to other such Latin American writers as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Peri Rossi is a remarkable talent in her own right. Her stories, as translated by Hecht, have both a stark, crystalline purity and a painful beauty."Museum" includes stories about violence, death, alienation, dislocation, and frustrated desire. The stories often feature unnamed characters in unnamed locales. Some of the most intriguing pieces in the "Museum" include "Tarzan's Roar," a deconstruction of a Hollywood icon; "The Lizard Christmas," which ironically comments on Christian tradition; and "the Effect of Light on Fish," which moves gracefully from an innocuous beginning to a disturbing climax. Overall, a frequently stunning collection by a very talented writer.

Cristina Peri Rossi has the knack of taking the absurd and building a surrealistic absurdity on it using clean, rational, direct langauge. A man suddenly unable to decide whether to go forward or backward, a cruise without a destination, a librarian working on documenting useless efforts, a person unable to cope with the decisions necessary to get out of bed. ... Simple, familiar actions turned topsy-turvy in a world uncomfortably our own. Recommended.