"[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
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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
