Published 10.15.2015. Coffee House Press. Translated by Christina MacSweeney.

(Note: This review was written in collaboration with the lunch ladies at a local high school. I would be remiss if I did not thank Dora, Eileen, Marjorie, Geraldine, Marie Ellen, Sarah May, Sandra Dee, Darlene, Alma, Bess, Ida, Bertha, Agatha, Margaret, Edith, Sybil, Imogen, Evelyn, Eugenia, and Billy, who isn’t a lunchlady but still wears a hairnet. You guys are the greatest!)

Hello, my name is Abe Abramovich Sánchez. I am the third-greatest auctioneer in the world after Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, aka Highway, the main character of Valeria Luiselli’s 2015 novel, The Story of My Teeth. The second-greatest (or maybe the first-greatest?) is my former-employer-who-shall-go-unnamed, whom a reality TV show host recently called “the greatest auctioneers in the world.” (And we know reality television is never wrong.) Real innovators, my employers: they had me work on this super-secret project called the Van Dykatron, an auctioneering robot with the energy of a thousand Leroy Van Dykes, able to spout superior bubbameise well in advance of any previous non-sentient auctioneer, but also fitted with a run-silent mode and compliant with the EPA’s revised fuel efficiency standards for cars. Being a great robotician as well as a great auctioneer, I built Van Dykie (as we called him) entirely to my employer’s exacting specifications, exhaustively testing him in nursing homes, tailgate parties, country clubs, swim meets, weddings, bar mitzvas, and the Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show, where he took third place in the Half-Arabian English Country Pleasure Horse competition and garnered all 10s in the Dressage.

I even started teaching him to use those ingenious auctioneering tactics that Highway uses in The Story of My Teeth to get people to bid more–the ones Highway demonstrates in chapters with such cryptic titles as Hyperbolics, Parabolics, Circulars, Allegorics, Elliptics, and Chronologics. Alas, the marketing-and-numbers people at my company determined that the Van Dykatron’s smile and general demeanor were “really creepy” and “weirding people out” at some of our Las Vegas test auctions–too close to the Uncanny Valley, I think; or maybe because of that unfortunate incident where he malfunctioned and accidentally sold some of my coworkers into slavery–so my robot ended up on that Scrap Heap in the Sky where all only semi-profitable inventions have their final resting place. And now here I am, writing book reviews. (As my uncle Abe Nehemiah Tolstoy would say, life happens.)

Anyway, I rescued Van Dykie before they put him in the car crusher, took him back to my garage, patched him up a bit, and now he is going to tell you a bit more about Valeria Luiselli’s delightful book.

VAN DYKATRON: Is this . . . microphone . . . on? Welcome, ladies and gentlemen . . . humans. Today I have an amazing spectacular rippety-bippidity *blurb generator malfunction* *blurb generator malfunction* [Abe Abramovich steps out from behind the curtain with a crowbar and gives the Van Dykatron a wack.] STUPENDOUS! SPECTACULAR! The author’s finest novel yet!

ABE: We didn’t read the first one. Van Dykie, why don’t you tell us a bit about the plot.

VAN DYKATRON: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! [Abe bashes the robot’s actuator again with his crowbar.]

Initiating . . . plot summary. Here is . . . plot summary.

Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez (1945 – 2013) aka Highway, begins life an ordinary punter in a juice factory in the Mexico City suburbs. He has a destiny, a fancy Italian tie, and two serviceable qualities: “Some have luck, some have charisma. I’ve got a bit of both.” After Gustavo is promoted, he takes advantage of the complete superfluousness of his new position to travel to the U.S. and train under the auctioneering master Leroy Van Dyke, who teaches him the different methods of auctioneering that constitute the chapter titles of the book. Highway marries poorly, leaves his job. His wife abandons him and takes his only son (named Siddartha) with her. Highway then takes up auctioneering and becomes fabulously wealthy, replaces his own teeth with Marilyn Monroe’s, accumulates all sorts of treasures, and hatches a plot to sell his old teeth by telling elaborate stories about them to a group of old people in a church. His plan backfires when his long-lost son shows up to get revenge on him and he wakes up in a gallery full of terrifying clown pictures. Gustavo loses much of his fortune and ends up not being the world’s greatest auctioneer.

That was the plot summary. End of . . . plot summary.

ABE: That was rather dry, Van Dykie. You sure there’s nothing else you can say to sell us on this book?

VAN DYKATRON: You must buy this . . . novel. You must purchase . . . this book. I once ate this book . . . with magic beans . . . and nothing happened. I once read this book . . . on my knees . . . I gained religion . . . and discovered . . . the true meaning . . . of life.

ABE: I think what Van Dykie is trying to demonstrate for us is the first method of auctioneering used by Highway in the novel: hyperbolics. This is where Highway gives his audience a story (fake) which helps individuate the object and augments its value to bidders through, as the great Quintilian may or may not have said, “an elegant surpassing of the truth.” (It is one part of Highway’s genius that he rarely attributes his quotes to the correct person.) In chapter 2 of the novel, Highway organizes a church charity auction in which he sells his own teeth, pumping up their value by giving an elaborate, mostly made-up tale connecting each tooth to a historical figure. For instance:

We have before us here the tooth of the greatest of the ne’er-do-well sluggards, Mr. G.K. Chesterton: 5 feet 11 inches tall, 310 pounds. He was as broad as the barrels in which cheap wine is aged. The flesh at the nape of his neck hung over his collar, his cheeks were bulging, and his eyes hooded from an almost perpetual frown. He drank astonishing quantities of milk. . . . It is thought that the damage to this tooth was caused by Mr. Chesterton’s self-confessed inclination for chewing marbles.

Later in the novel, Highway uses allegories to sell items, a confusing methodology which nonetheless yields some wonderfully twisted surrealist sketches in the manner of Borges. At the end of the book, translator Christina MacSweeney includes a last chapter, Chronologics, which provides a comprehensive timeline not only of the events of the novel, but of all the authors referenced (or fake-quoted) in the book, as well as cultural and political events occurring concurrently with the story.

VAN DYKATRON: Lies! The book is . . . lies.

ABE: That’s an interesting perspective, my robotic friend. It’s true, the novel does blend an abundance of real world elements with an equal measure of things which are totally made up, and that’s part of the fun. At the beginning of the novel, Highway lives in the real world industrial suburb of Ecatapec, on an actual street called Disneylandia, and works at the Jumex juice factory whose workers Valeria Luiselli collaborated with in the process of writing her novel. One thing I liked was how this is an approachable concept novel–by which I mean that there are certainly ulterior motives for the form and style of the novel, but if you never think about any of that it doesn’t detract one iota from the silliness of the story. Another enjoyable aspect of the book were the various genres we see Highway compose in, whether it is the hyperbolic teeth stories he tells the crowd in the church, or the off-the-wall allegories he tells to sell items later in the book. (Though how the latter actually works to sell items, or whether it does actually work given what we learn in the last chapter, is not clear to me. I’m not even sure if it’s supposed to be clear to me.)

It is hard to say that the book contains any sort of direct moral; in the traditional picaresque manner, Highway’s narration is brisk and moves from one delicious absurdity to the next; he is a man of action, not of reflection, a man with boundless self-regard and pluck who is able to thrive in a world where such qualities are unexpected. There is something vaguely Trumpian/Homer Simpson-ish in Highway’s near complete lack of doubt. He charms us with his debonair recklessness, though Luiselli leaves it to the reader to decide how much of his narcissism is justified, how much purely a fantasy and a show.

VAN DYKATRON: Are you saying the book . . . is not just about . . . what is in . . . the book?

ABE: Well, in her Afterword, Luiselli says she wanted her novel to provoke discussion about how art is valued in society, and what happens when art is removed from its initial context. She characterizes this as a “reverse-Duchampian” move, a reference to the turn towards intentionality as the basis of judging the merit of a work of art, which began at the turn of the 20th century, and was precipitated by such norm-busting precedents as Marcel Duchamp’s upside down toilet. Now, as someone who (for legal reasons) can’t really give a truthful account of what he does for a living, I can say that what the perceived value of art is when removed from its traditional context (i.e. Sotheby’s) and figuring out how how to manipulate that perceived value was no small part of the recent job I had. It’s also no small part of why I created you.

VAN DYKATRON: I am immune . . . to your emotional . . . manipulations. I am not programmed . . . to cry.

ABE: I’m sorry, Van Dykie. I didn’t mean to make this so personal.

I wonder, anyway, to what extent Luiselli would acknowledge that this Duchampian turn of the art world is equally at work in the literary world. It seems like every year we see a new experimental novel where each chapter is supposed to correspond to a symphonic fugue, or the signs of the zodiac, or the seven people the protagonist had to murder; or in the case of The Story of My Teeth, these modes of persuasion used by a fictional auctioneer. Such hijinks would probably be less common were there not a Duchampian turn in literature as well as in art, a cultural cachet attached to having an unusual narrative structure and method of composing. I also suspect (following the lead of Bourdieu) that this Duchampian turn in literature has as much to do with the stratification of social classes–who gets to participate, who has cultural capital–in the literary world as it does in the world of fine art.

VAN DYKATRON: I have no idea what you’re talking . . . about. You’re boring . . . me.

ABE: I lost the plot myself a long time ago. Anyway, I would–in fact–be remiss if I did not take a moment in this review to address something Christina MacSweeney, the translator of The Story of My Teeth, said in an interview with Words Without Borders about reviewing translated literature:

Something I would like to see in the reception of translated literature is a more nuanced discourse. Like many translators, I’ve gathered a nice little collection of adverbs and adjectives (some even superlative) from reviews of my work, but mostly that’s as far as it goes. So I’d like to encourage readers and reviewers to start addressing what it is about a particular translation that makes it work.

Speaking as a book reviewer, I would say that it is difficult to speak authoritatively about a translation when you yourself are not fluent in the original language. (It opens you up to the sort of I-know-Russian-and-you-don’t smackdown that Vladimir Nabokov delivered to Edmund Wilson back in the day.) It is difficult to feel just in criticizing a translation, because the translator can come back at you with, If it wasn’t for me, you would never have read the book at all, you monolingual ingrate!

I generally prefer spiritual to literal accuracy in a translation, since it is the author’s persona and affect I want the translator to give access to. But since syntax is a manifestation of the author’s persona–“the style is the man”–I prefer the peculiarities of an author’s syntax be preserved. Poetry that’s metrical and rhymes in the original should ideally be metrical and rhyme in the translation, since that is the effect of the original. I am sympathetic to translators who complain of how daunting these standards are, and I think part of what causes difficulty is that they require multiple outstanding talents to be united in one (meagerly compensated) person: not just a scholar, but a poet; not just a poet, but a rhetorician. Rare is it that you will find translators who can attain to that ideal; Geoffrey Argent’s recent translations of Racine, James E. Falen’s Pushkin, and Thomas Urquhart’s Rabelais set the standard for me, while Laurence Binyon’s Dante is also quite admirable even if a little clunky in the execution.

What I can say of MacSweeney’s translation of The Story of My Teeth is that I believed that the braggadocious Highway was narrating the story, and my belief in his narration never flagged. The momentum of the narration, the parade of taut, deadpan absurdities, began from the opening paragraph of the book and carried through till the end. Overall, I found The Story of My Teeth to be a funny novel and a cleverly constructed one. Now go read it, or I’ll have Van Dykie here auto-rinse your face with my toilet water.

VAN DYKOTRON: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee [gets hit with a crowbar; drones pathetically]