Lisbon Syndrome

Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles is a fiction writer, screenwriter, and teacher. His five previous novels are: Blue Label, winner of the Arturo Uslar Pietri award for Latin American literature and shortlisted for the Critics Award of Venezuela; Transylvania, Unplugged, shortlisted for the Arturo Uslar Pietri award; Liubliana, honorable mention, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Bicentennial Literary Award, and winner of the Critics Award of Venezuela; Jezebel; and Julián. He is cowriter of the films Opposite Direction, Jezebel, and The Consequences. He presently lives in Madrid.Paul Filev is a Melbourne-based literary translator and editor who translates from the Macedonian and the Spanish. His translations include the novels Alma Mahler by Sasho Dimoski (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), Blue Label by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles (Turtle Point Press, 2018), and the anthology Contemporary Macedonian Fiction (Dalkey Archive Press, 2019).

“[The Lisbon Syndrome] celebrates...the power of stories to raise our awareness of the value of life in the midst of tragedies.... [The] novel offers many surprises right up to the end.”—Edward Waters Hood, World Literature Today"The Lisbon Syndrome is very dark, but [with]...an underlying sense of hopefulness, a human spirit that still finds its way through.... [A]n effective portrait of contemporary Venezuela."—M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review“The Lisbon Syndrome is a love song for two places, one that has vanished suddenly, another whose disappearance is unbearably slow. It’s also a love song for the people who inhabited these places and keep fighting for them to the very end. Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles has written a courageous, beautiful novel.” ―Rodrigo Hasbún, author of Affections“The Lisbon Syndrome uses the notion of the apocalypse as a very explicit symbol, as a metaphor for a political debacle. Because if each human being is a universe, the world has ended once and again with each death. . . . The universes obliterated by the Venezuelan dictatorship cannot come back to life. Nevertheless, an apparent pessimistic view turns into a narration about the love for freedom and the ability to walk over ruins in order to protect it, to regain it, to own it." ―Keila Vall de la Ville, author of The Animal Days