Review 20: The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

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!

Comments

Review 1: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. How could you not love a book that begins like that? Early on in Stasiland , Anna Funder discusses the ‘puzzle women of Nuremberg’. This is a group of underfunded people (both men and women, oddly) who spend their days piecing together the scraps of documents the Stasi hurriedly shredded at the end of their regime. It feels like an apt analogy for Funder’s book itself – she carefully and brilliantly pieces together a view of what it was like to live in East Germany, and the effect it’s had on its citizens decades after the Berlin Wall was wrenched down, from snapshot interviews, research and her own experiences… despite the fact that most people she encounters would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. I came to this book knowing that East Germany was run as a Communist surveillance state, but little else. That was no problem. ...

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...

Review 9: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Portable Veblen is an odd read, and possibly not in the ways you’d expect. Picking it up, I assumed it was some sort of sci-fi or magic realist novel. Was a Veblen some sort of futuristic gun? A translation device? A highly treatable but somewhat embarrassing rash? In fact, as with so much in this world, it really only serves to highlight my troglodyte-level ignorance. Apparently Veblen is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian socialist and sociologist living in America in the late 1800s. He essentially decried capitalism and proposed an alternative system to Marxism, and it is after this prominent thinker that TPV ’s main character, Veblen, is named. For me, the novel is really about contradictions between people and between families as they try to adjust from being purely individual to being part of a wider group. How do you decide what to compromise on and what to retain? What is an unhealthy hangover from your upbringing and what is a genuinely core part of ...

The 100 Book Year

Search This Blog