Review by New York Times Review
ON ITS NOT-SO-PLACID surface, Valeria Luiselli's second novel is the tale of a guy named Gustavo (Highway) Sánchez Sánchez, who auctions off his old teeth, claiming they are from the mouths of Plato, Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and Borges, among others. Then he takes his profits and buys a set of teeth that supposedly belonged to Marilyn Monroe, implanting them in his own mouth. After that, things go well for a while until Highway's son, Siddhartha, knocks him out and steals Monroe's teeth, leaving his dad chopperless. Eventually Highway runs into a man named Voragine (an abyss?) who helps him, and who later appears to be the person telling this story. Along the way, the names of Proust, Unamuno, Foucault, Walser, Cortázar and Raymond Roussel burst out of random paragraphs like startled grouse. The story part of "The Story of My Teeth" is told with considerable charm, and the namedropping is just enough to signal that there's more afoot here than merely an old-fashioned good time. There are other whiffs of philosophy, philology and excursions into other short tales as well. Then, just about the time a reader may ask where all of this is heading, the narrative stops cold and the book gets really interesting. With about 40 pages left, we are presented with a series of photos, slightly puzzling, each accompanied with a quotation by, for example, H.G. Wells, Rubén Darío or Voltaire. Next follows a completely wonderful chronology created by Luiselli's translator, Christina MacSweeney, an elegant map of time, space and ideas, large and trivial, historic and fictional. There is something thrilling about finding a writer generous enough to invite another to participate in her work, and it is at this point that the book blooms into an entirely different creation. Unlike much fiction, whose purpose is to mesmerize a reader, this book is porous. It allows the world and its readers to enter its conception. The novel - and I count all four of its parts as a single entity - closes with an afterword by Luiselli in the fashion of Roussel ("How I Wrote Certain of My Books"). It explains how the novel began as a project commissioned by an art gallery and sponsored by Jumex, a Mexican juice corporation. The book was to be a work of fiction for the catalog of an exhibition. Luiselli decided to write what became this short novel in installments, which would be read to and discussed by groups of the Jumex factory workers. They in turn sent their reactions to the writer, who incorporated them along with their own stories into the narrative, making the book a collaboration of sorts, a shared vision. Valeria Luiselli is as much a cartographer as a writer, interested in finding areas still unmapped. As in her first novel, "Faces in the Crowd," she combines fictional narrative with historical and intellectual points of reference, and the result is writing without preconceptions, as airy and open as a soccer field. Prefigured by her excellent book of essays, "Sidewalks," "The Story of My Teeth" is playful, attentive and very smart without being for a minute pretentious. It's Walter Benjamin without tears - sunnier, more casual and more nimble. Luiselli is an exciting writer to watch, not only for this book, but also for the fresh approach she brings to fiction, one that invites participation and reaction, even skepticism - a living, breathing map. JIM KRUSOE'S latest book, "The Sleep Garden," will be published this winter.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 6, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Luiselli, author of Faces in the Crowd (2014) and Sidewalks (2014), now presents an incredibly strange, oddly irresistible novel about the incomparable auctioneer Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez (called Highway), who invents elaborate backstories for his collection of molars and incisors in order to fetch the highest bid. That's only the beginning. Highway soon reunites with his estranged son, Siddhartha, and then survives a disconcerting encounter with clowns in an art museum. Later, he enlists the legacies of well-known writers (Paz, Borges, Pushkin) in selling allegoric lots at auction that include prosthetic limbs, bonsai trees, and full-size rodent costumes. Equally as fascinating as Luiselli's compelling, impulsive prose is her process for creating this novel in collaboration with workers at the Jumex juice factory in Mexico City. Luiselli sent chapters to be read aloud to workers, who then discussed the passages and sent feedback. Reminiscent of the serialized novels used to entertain and educate Cuban cigar-rollers, Luiselli marvelously redefines the relationship between author and audience. An absolutely unique, truly absurd must-read.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
One of the most unforgettable images in any book this year is that of Gustavo "Highway" Sánchez Sánchez, the protagonist of Luiselli's delightfully unclassifiable novel, walking around the streets of Mexico City, smiling at people with the teeth of Marilyn Monroe installed in his mouth-teeth he won at an "auction of contraband memorabilia in a karaoke bar in Little Havana." Auctioneering is Highway's trade, and, according to him, he's the best at what he does because he's a "lover and collector of good stories, which is the only honest way of modifying the value of an object." Luiselli's novel takes the same liberties with traditional storytelling as Highway: this isn't so much a novel as a contorted collection of narrative yarns. In one section, Highway auctions 10 of his original teeth (remember, he has Marilyn Monroe's in his mouth), passing them off as the teeth of Virginia Woolf, Plato, and G.K. Chesterton, among others. In another section, Highway creates allegories using various auction lots, including a prosthetic leg, as starting points, which quickly spin out and feature a who's who of real Spanish-language writers. In one, the Argentine writer Alan Pauls talks about horse depression; in another, Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera is a policewoman; Luiselli's parents put on rat and mouse costumes and have "outlandish, noisy, uninterrupted coitus." These off-the-wall turns are surprising and charming, but, above all, there is an insatiable hunger for storytelling in these pages. Luiselli's (Faces in the Crowd) novel so completely buys into its conceit-the author herself makes an appearance in an allegory as a 15-year-old "mediocre high school student [who] stammered and overused the suffix -ly"-that it's difficult not to follow wherever it takes you. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The year 2014 was a good one for Mexican-born author Luiselli: her debut novel, Faces in the Crowd, was released to much acclaim, and she was chosen as one of 5 Under 35 by the National Book Foundation. Her second novel, though ingenious and affecting in parts, is more of a metanarrative exercise than a straightforward narrative. Written partly under commission from the Galeria Jumex, a contemporary art gallery funded by a juice factory in Ecatepec, Mexico, it describes the life and exploits of Gustavo "Highway" Sánchez. Highway starts off as a lowly security guard and ends up the world's best auctioneer, traveling the globe to sell things and curate his own collection of unusual objects. One such acquisition is Marilyn Monroe's teeth, which he has implanted to replace his own. Later in life, he ends up trapped in an art installation by his estranged son and takes a neighborhood boy as an apprentice to tell his story. The novel's experimental structure is full of literary allusions and bon mots from across the ages. VERDICT Readers hungry for more from Luiselli will be happy with a clever variation on her style, but its quirkiness may turn off others. Recommended for fans of metafiction and Latin American literature junkies.-Kate Gray, Worcester P.L., MA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A lively, loopy experimental novel rich with musings on language, art, and, yes, teeth. Each section of the second novel by Mexican author Luiselli (Faces in the Crowd, 2014) opens with an epigram about the disconnect between the signifier and signified. If you dozed off during lectures on semiotics in college, fear not: though the author is interested in the slippery nature of description, this novel's style and tone are brisk and jargon-free. The narrator, Gustavo, has decided late in life to become an auctioneer ("to have my teeth fixed"), a job he thrives at in part by skillfully overhyping the values of the objects on offer. Not that he's immune to being oversold himself: did the new set of teeth he buys at auction really once belong to Marilyn Monroe? The skeletal plot focuses on Gustavo's hosting an auction to benefit a church outside Mexico City, his hoard of prized objects, and his reunion with his son. But the book lives in its offbeat digressions, like an extended discussion of literary eminences' lives via their teeth. (St. Augustine was inspired to write his Confessions due to a toothache; G.K. Chesterson had a marble-chewing habit; false teeth were recommended to calm Virginia Woolf's inner turmoil.) But all this dental chatter isn't precisely the point. "We have here before us today pieces of great value, since each contains a story replete with small lessons," Gustavo tells a group of auction attendees, and the whole book is a kind of extended commentary on how possessions acquire value largely through the stories we tell about them. (In an afterword, Luiselli explains that this "novel-essay" was inspired by such questions and was first written for workers in a factory outside Mexico City that has a gallery connected to it.) A clever philosophical novel that, as the author puts it, has "less to do with lying than surpassing the truth." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
