The Story of My Teeth

Starred review from March 9, 2015
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 stammered and overused the suffix -ly”—that it’s difficult not to follow wherever it takes you.

Starred review from July 15, 2015
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."

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August 1, 2015

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" Sanchez. 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

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