Museum of Useless Efforts

“The museum closes at eight. Virginia herself turns the simple metal key in the lock, without any further precautions, since no one would ever try to rob the museum. It only happened on one occasion, when a man intended to erase his name from the catalogue. In his adolescence, he had made a futile effort, and now he was ashamed of it; he did not want any traces to remain.”

According to the archives of a peculiar museum, over the years, children have wanted to fly, people have travelled in search of non-existent places, a trapeze artist has developed vertigo, and a man spent ten years trying to teach his dog to talk.

It is this gallery of impossible tasks and ignominious outcomes, rather than past glories, that provides the theme for the thirty unusual stories collected in THE MUSEUM OF FUTILE EFFORTS (1983), a seminal work of short fiction by Cristina Peri Rossi.

From wing to wing, with no easy exit through the souvenir shop, rises—according to critics—with irony and corrosive humour “failure as an act of poetic resistance,” as beautiful as that of the athlete who stops one step from the finish line to contemplate the sky (“The Runner Trips”) or the chaos caused by someone on a crowded metro escalator who suddenly forgets whether they intend to go up or down (“The Gap”).