The teeth are the true
windows to the soul; they are the tabula rasa The teeth are the true
windows to the soul; they are the tabula rasa on which all our vices and all
our virtues are inscribed.
Last year Valeria Luiselli was shortlisted for the Best
Translated Book Award for her novel “Faces In The Crowd” (translated by
Christina MacSweeney) and she backs up with a further shortlisting in 2016 for
“The Story of My Teeth” (also translated by Christina MacSweeney). A few days
ago I wrote about young female writers, pushing traditional literature’s
boundaries, and Luiselli definitely sits in that boat.
In the Afterword
to this work, our author explains that the book is the result of several
collaborations. Working with a serial novel style (a la Dickens’ “The Pickwick
Papers”), Luiselli released low-budget chapbooks for distribution to factory
workers in a juice factory, and a reading club was established. Recording the
worker’s discussions about the chapbooks, their insights and discussions
dictated the course of the narrative for future instalments. As Luiselli says
“The result of these shared concerns is this collective “novel-essay” about the
production of value and meaning in contemporary art and literature.”
Our story opens with Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, or ‘Highway’,
our protagonist narrator, telling us of his obsession with collecting, from his
father’s finger nail clippings, drinking straws given to him by an unfaithful
wife, rubber bands and paper clips from his desk job at a juice factory, to
collecting courses for managing possible staff crises?
You are hooked from the first page, here are the opening two
paragraphs:
I’m the best Auctioneer in the
world, but no one knows it because I’m a discreet sort of man. My name is
Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, though people call me Highway, I believe with
affection. I can imitate Janis Joplin after two rums. I can interpret Chinese
fortune cookies. I can stand an egg upright on a table, the way Christopher
Columbus did in the famous anecdote. I know how to count to eight in Japanese:
ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi. I can float on my back.
This is the story of my teeth,
and my treatise on collectibles and the variable value of objects. As any other
story, this one begins with the Beginning; and then comes the Middle, and then
the End. The rest, as a friend of mine always says, is literature: hyperbolics,
parabolics, circulars, allegorics, and elliptics. I don’t know what comes after
that. Possibly ignominy, death, and, finally, post-mortem fame. At that point
it will no longer be my place to say anything in the first person. I will be a
dead man, a happy, enviable man.
Our narrator becomes an auctioneer and learns that “there
are four types of auctions: circular, elliptical, parabolic and hyperbolic.”
These names become the names of the books in our novel, along with “The Story
(Beginning, Middle End)”, “The Allegorics”, see literature construction above,
and “The Chronologic”, which is actually a section added by the translator, in
the theme of being a truly collaborative piece, with a timeline of Gustavo
Sánchez Sánchez’s life aligned to significant (?) literary and art events (for
example, 2004 – Posthumous publication of Uruguayan author Mario Levrero’s La novela
luminoso, which includes a 450-pahe
prologue recounting how the writer spent the grant awarded to him by the
Guggenheim Foundation. Or March 2012
– New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone curates an exhibition that includes Hans
Schärer’s Madonna, in which the teeth
are replaced by yellowing pebbles.) For the real literature nuts – Mario Levrero’s novel has not been translated
into English, but it is referenced in Andrés Neuman’s “Talking To Oursleves”.
Each “book” within the novel opens with a fortune cookie
quote and a circular conundrum of an epigraph, adding to the many layers
contained here.
For sheer reading joy the work is absolutely peppered with
quotable gems;
It’s a mystery why all
female Mediterranean bodies look like eggplants after the age of fifty.
That’s politicians for
you, clergy included: their heads are so full of themselves that they aren’t
the least bit curious about other people’s lives.
I’ve got an
unparalleled talent for resignation, like all Catholic men.
Find photos of all the
writers you respect, and you’ll see that their teeth remain a permanently
occult mystery. This is in reference to respected writer’s never showing
their teeth (noting Luiselli’s photo on the back inner sleeve shows no teeth)
This is a novel that references numerous writers, numerous
artists, well read, or art fans will find many sections they can revel in;
What auctioneers auction, in the
end, are just names of people, and maybe words. All I do is give them new
content.
Is that what Luiselli is doing here? With the numerous
references, epigraphs about language or words or the nonexistence of language
relationships, containing conundrums, the metaphysics of words, is she giving
old words and themes “new content”? Is she selling the unsellable? Is this a
story that already exists?
A many layered work, a pleasure to read, a celebration of
both the art world and the written word, there is no simple way to describe the
book, other than to recommend readers of translated books to get a copy and
revel in its joy. I do know of a number of fellow bloggers who were less than
enthused about this book, maybe comparing it to her “Faces In The Crowd”, but
for me, it read easily, it brought a smile to my face, it had enough ambiguity and
“puzzles” to keep me thinking, in other words it satiated the main reading
pleasures.
What could be more poignant than yet another quote from this
amazing work? All the parameters we
normally use to measure our actions seem trivial.
As our author said in her own words, this is a “novel-essay”
about the production value and meaning in contemporary art and literature. In
my opinion, a highly rated and enjoyable novel that I think is in with a
fighting chance of collecting the Best Translated Book Award main gong, not
having read the full shortlist it could be a bit premature to make that
statement but I have it towards the top of the pile from the ones I have read.
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