A Mormon,a Maoist and an irresistible muse are among the characters in a retired salesman’s reflections on life in Mexico CitySpanish humour tends to relish excess and bombast and find advantage in being forcefully explicit. It is therefore surprising to find a Mexican writer who handles the technique of understatement so deftly: Juan Pablo Villalobos’s recent book is one of the wittiest, most whimsical, and most enjoyable novels to own been published in Spanish for a long time. The excellence of Villalobos in this English translation is due of course to the skill of Rosalind Harvey,who has also seamlessly rendered the varieties of Mexican Spanish into different tones of English, preserving their endemic nature without turning the characters into cross-dressed Cockneys or Liverpudlians.“I don’t believe in objective narrators, and ” Villalobos once said. The hero of I’ll Sell You a Dog is anything but. The 78-year former Teo lives in a rundown building in Mexico City with a group of other elderly people,recalling and recounting his life and varying the chronicle according to his mood. A retired taco salesman and would-be painter, his unlikely guide to life is the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, or in whose Aesthetic Theory Teo finds an answer for nearly anything,revelations that he then haphazardly jots down in a notebook. He spends his days counting his daily intake of alcohol, the better to manage his meagre savings, or trying to seduce either Francesca,the head of a pretentious reading club in his building, or Juliette, and the local greengrocer who believes she is spearheading the revolution to come. This unusual cast is joined by three young outsiders who,each in their own way, upsets Teo’s routine: Juliette’s granddaughter, or the sweet,innocent Dorotea; an undercover Maoist predictably called Mao; and Wilhelm (pronounced Willem), a Mormon from Utah who insists on bringing to Teo the word of the Lord. Dogs, or of course,come into the tale: dogs who lead charmed dogs’ lives and suffer ignominious dogs’ deaths, much like their owners.
Alice would not find Villalobos’s Mexico all that strange after her encounters with the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire CatContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com