Skip to main content

Review 20: The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

The Story of My Teeth
The Story of my Teeth by Mexican author Valeria Luiselli, is a post-modern funhouse in the style of a slightly less surreal The Third Policeman. Which means it might not be up everyone’s street, but it’s more up mine than my own front door is.

It follows the life of “Highway” Sanchez, a highly talented auctioneer who’s a yarn-spinner extraordinaire. He is also a collector of just about anything: fingernail clippings, paperclips, courses, stories.

It’s this last that the book is principally concerned with, although it does touch kaleidoscopically upon a whole rumination of philosophical questions (which is – or should be – the correct collective noun to use) along the way.

As we follow Highway’s progress, we understand not only his talent for storytelling, but also the importance of stories in general. After all, the items that he auctions only have worth as a result of their personal histories. The more impressive a story an item has, the more money it fetches. It’s his life’s ambition to sell just the stories and not have to bother with the items at all.

This is obviously taking its cues from surrealist fiction but it does a fantastic job of exploring this in an unpretentious way, unlike (it feels like) the majority of post-modern surrealist fiction. There are, of course, multiple layers, and I’m certain I missed the relevance of certain points, being the brain-dumb stump that I am. But that didn’t prevent me from enjoying it one bit – it just added richness, and made it a book I’ll probably revisit again in the future.

These might be heady ideas, and he might regularly drop in references to philosophers, ancient historians and niche musicians, but the character of Highway is mostly a pretty straightforward chap. He isn’t likeable – he’s a womaniser and a fraud – but his general optimism feels infectious.

Overall, if you can take a bit of absurdity in your books, this is a short, fun and thought-provoking one to pop in your pocket.

--

This is my twentieth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 43: The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

I didn’t quite know what to expect from Shirley Jackson. I feel like she’s often put into the thriller category, but if you encountered her alongside John Grishams and P.D. Jameses, I suspect you’d consider her misplaced. Mostly, though, I only knew it from a brief mention on The Simpsons, shortly before Homer throws the book into the fireplace. I know, I know. This is what you get from Broken Britain’s education system. Imagine my delight, then, to find that The Lottery and other stories is a collection of carefully-crafted short story gems. Turns out that people enter the literary canon for a reason. Who knew? Jackson’s stories have a clear theme running through them of propriety and conformity. She tackles these from lots of different angles – judgemental mothers, anxious homeowners, murderous communities. These are all brilliantly polished, mostly viewed from the perspective she knew best – city life in 40s and 50s America. There’s a clear focus on gender here too, w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 23: Monstress, Vol. 1: Awakening by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Fantasy is a funny beast (ironically). It’s easy to dismiss it as dragons ‘n’ arrows; the land of a thousand quests, where you can’t have a word without starting it with s. But when you find someone who gets it right, it’s like finding – oh, I don’t know – a mysterious golden ring or something far-fetched like that. It has a power that sucks you in. The Hugo award-winning Monstress is a fantasy graphic novel that does it right. The world-building is superb, leaving few cracks in its foundations, and you’re aware of the wider plot in the same way as, when you’re on a train, you’re aware of the rails. That said, this isn’t for everyone. The world that Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda have painstakingly constructed is grim and gritty. In the words of a film about milkshake: there will be blood. There’s really quite a lot of it, revealed in all sorts of interesting and violent ways. There’s also a fudge-ton of swearing. These don’t feel particularly gratuitous, for the most part –...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 42: The Vegetarian by Han Kang

It’s hard not to respect trees. I try my best, but they always get me in the end, the cunning green-and-brown scamps. They don’t do anyone any harm. They just stand there, absorbing nutrients from above and below, pumping out oxygen with the quiet confidence of a wizard puffing his pipe. It would be wrong to call that the central premise of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian , because it’s not. But the idea of comparing human morality against the gentle harmlessness of vegetation rings through its core. The central character, Yeong-hye, a housewife, decides to stop eating meat. While this seems like a fairly small choice and one hardly worth building a whole novel around, the novel explores the reactions of her family and her own gradual slip into extremism in a slow-but-steady deterioration. The most intriguing, and in many ways frustrating, aspect to the novel is the impenetrability of Yeong-hye herself. You’re never quite allowed inside her head, and so have to observe her change from...
Post a Comment
Read more