Title: The Story of My Teeth
Author: Valeria Luiselli
Translator: Christina MacSweeney
Published by: Coffeehouse Press
My rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Where I got the book: Public library
Content warning: Medical procedure performed without consent
“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.” (Source)
This is another impossible book to review. One of the reasons I love translated literature is that I end up reading really experimental writing that pushed boundaries, both in the original language and in English. On the other hand sometimes I finish a book and have no idea what I’ve just read.
The Story of My Teeth is a weird book. It’s a meandering tale where the main character, Highway, blusters and narrates his life in a fashion that benefits him. The plot meanders, the characters discuss the meaning and purpose of art, names of authors and artists are constantly dropped, and familial relationships between Highway and his son Siddhartha are strained to the point where Siddhartha buys Highway in an auction, then steals his teeth while Highway is unconscious. There’s even a weird dream sequence with clowns.
I really wanted to like The Story of My Teeth but found that the narration style just didn’t work for me and the constant name dropping left me lost. The Story of My Teeth reads like metafiction with it’s incorporation of celebrities, the bravados of Highway and how the book is written in collaboration with workers at a juice factory. I didn’t actually realize that the book had been commissioned by Jumex, a Mexican juice company and Luiselli wrote the book chapter by chapter through correspondence with the workers and included their reactions to her work in the story.
I went in expecting this book to be more along the lines of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino and wound up finishing The Story of My Teeth not knowing where the line between reality and fiction lay, what was real and what was merely a dream.
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