THE STORY OF MY TEETH

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The Story of My Teeth, Valeria Luiselli, Coffee House Press, 2015, 195 pp (translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney)

 

 

Summary from Goodreads:

I was born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City, with four premature teeth and my body completely covered in a very fine coat of fuzz. But I'm grateful for that inauspicious start because ugliness, as my other uncle, Eurípides López Sánchez, was given to saying, is character forming.

Highway is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the "notorious infamous" like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf. Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, Teeth is an elegant, witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli's own literary influences.

My Review:

You could call this book experimental, or unclassifiable; you could call it a novel or a collection of vignettes. It is also a work of art in the paper form, is delightful, humorous, and distinctly literary. Though barely a novel in the usual sense, it does tell a story, evoke a place, and is definitely about teeth.

I happen to like all of the above, though I've not had much attention on teeth in my lifetime. Come to think of it however, my mother had dentures from an early age and I do recall many scenes where she was either removing them or putting them back in. Perhaps this why I was drawn to the title.

Gustavo "Highway" Sanchez Sanchez is a denizen of the industrial suburbs of Mexico City. His particular skill is as an auctioneer, a unique one for he uses hyperbolic stories, improvised on the spot, to make the items being auctioned take on more value. Highway also has an entire house full of collectibles. He considers himself an expert in both fields.

In the way of a novel this book gives readers a patchy life story of this caricature of a character. But it is his stories, especially the ones he tells to sell off his own teeth at a crucial down and out moment, which give the book its tone.

Had I gone into it expecting a standard novel form, I would have been dismayed. Luckily I read the Afterword first, something I rarely do, so I was prepared. As I read, I was reminded of the early books of V S Naipaul. The community and its way of life are conjured into focus until I felt I was in the churches, the cafes, and the streets of Highway's part of town.

Probably not a book for most of the readers I know. Definitely a refreshing break from what I usually read.