The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Museum of Useless Efforts by Cristina Peri RossiT.J. Gerlach
Cristina Peri Rossi. The Museum of Useless Efforts. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001. 159 pp. Paper: $15.00.
The museum in Peri Rossi’s title story is a library of thick, encyclopedic volumes cataloging by year thousands of "useless efforts." The efforts are movingly ordinary, not insane inventions undertaken by madmen, but a man pursuing an unrequited love for twenty years or children at the beach digging holes that are then washed away by the ocean. But whether the scopes of these useless efforts are large or small, it becomes clear that what is so powerful about them is that they are stories. In this way Peri Rossi aligns herself, and by extension the reader, alongside what the narrator of another story describes as those "melancholy activities certain to fail . . . which to me seemed like the only worthwhile ones." For Peri Rossi that worth is centered in language-in fact many of the stories take as their conceits language itself, usually figures of speech such as "Time Heals All Wounds," "Deaf as a Doorknob," or "Between a Rock and a Hard Place." Peri Rossi’s technique is to literalize these clichés, revealing their metaphorical and lyrical potential as she pushes them to wonderful, dream-logical conclusions. If the mood of this book is one of Sisyphean futility, the stories themselves locate the beauty within that futile motion. [T. J. Gerlach]