My TeethMy teethAre younger than I amYet crumble awayInside my head.My eyes(My age)Grow dim. My feetAlthoughNo younger than IHave taken meA journeyTo mountain topsThrough forest gladesAlong seashoresUp stone stepsOver bridgesAnd no returnThe hips grate The knees creakBut the feetObliviousGo on.

Your typical one-star/five-star split so I'm sitting out the provision of stars for this one. Iridescent and irritating, admirable and abominable, loved it, hated it, made me want to read a thriller sans pics, chronology, fortune cookies, kitschy collectibles, literary reference. Never believed in Highway's existence even if disbelief was intentional. Interesting which writers get mentioned in books like these (a genre is forming -- someone's probably already written an essay and named it): Borg...

I think I was really taken with the title of this one, but I probably should have read more about it. It really wasn't for me. I found it mildy amusing at best and really just finished it to finish it. It fits into a tradition of Latin American surrealist/absurdist literature--and I like the story behind it of a collaboration with workers at a juice factory--but this ode to storytelling didn't do much for me. Calling it a novel is pushing it.

A novel's narrator introduces himself as 'charismatic': on the page, this would alert the reader to suspect a buffoon, and unreliability. From the voice of a professional audiobook reader, however, there is more doubt - the correlation between sound and assertion seems like a statement of believeable positive qualities, similar to what's found on a CV or job application. And when an author has created an opposite-sex narrator, does hearing the story from someone whose gender corresponds to the n...

I first learned of this book on the 2016 Tournament of Books Longlist. When I found it at the library, the description made me laugh, in fact all the back says is, "Some men have luck, some men have charisma. I've got both. I'm the best auction caller in the world, my name is Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez, and this is the story of my teeth."If that makes you laugh the rest of the book probably will too. Because of how the book was written, the entire thing feels rather meta and episodic. The author wr...

2.5/10Something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?Well!This book is as incomprehensible to me as Bob Dylan was to our parents, and to our children. Nobody got Dylan, like we got Dylan, and so the best I can hope for the story of {his} teeth is that somebody "gets" it -- but not like Adriana La Cerva got it, please god!I can't for the life of me comprehend what/why/where/when/who ... and wtf for? The best I can offer is Luiselli's own explanation: This book is the...

3 "humorous, creative but also tedious" stars !!Most(est) Fun Review Written in 2020 Award I have to keep this review short. This is one of my BFs favorite books. He has read this five times and has badgered me to read this for years. He loves this book and mentions it often, brings it up at dinner parties, at galleries, on the bus and sings about it in the shower. He needs me to worship this novel and I, alas, simply cannot. Even drinking eight daiquiris on the Beach in Belize did not make me l...

Early in 2013 Valeria Luiselli was commissioned to write a work of fiction for the catalogue of ‘The Hunter and the Factory,’ an exhibition at the Jumex gallery, a prominent collection of contemporary art owned by the Grupo Jumex –a juice factory located in Ecatepec de Morelos, the industrial wasteland on the outskirts of Mexico city. The exhibit, and Luiselli’s commission, aimed to interrogate the links between the gallery and the factory, the artists and the workers, and the town itself as bot...

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 o

The story of my teeth: a recollection in six installmentsThe first story is one my mother used to tell, and which I listened to with more attention than to other family stories because in this one I was the main character. It seems that when I was about three, there was a gathering at our home to honour my father's great aunt who was celebrating her ninetieth birthday. One of the relatives brought along a tape recorder to record the old lady's reminiscences but she refused to speak into the 'mac...

You could call this book experimental, or unclassifiable; you could call it a novel or a collection of vignettes. It is also a work of art in the paper form, is delightful, humorous, and distinctly literary. Though barely a novel in the usual sense, it does tell a story, evoke a place, and is definitely about teeth.I happen to like all of the above, though I've not had much attention on teeth in my lifetime. Come to think of it however, my mother had dentures from an early age and I do recall m

A strange reading experience but a really cool little backstory as to how the novel came about.

Crazy, strange, funny, clever, original, unique, fresh, delightfull. Between gasps of laughter and having to read certain phrases and passages two times thinking:' No, did she really write this?!' A small book to reread and make people happy by giving it as a present."Everyone knows that horses have no compassion, I told Alan Pauls. If a horse sees you standing in front of it, crying, it just chews its hay and blinks. You start crying harder, your eyes overflowing with tears and pain, and the ho...

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...

My luck was without equal, my life was a poem, and I was certain that one day, someone was going to write the beautiful tale of my dental autobiography.Literature has a unique role in the discussions of truth and ideas. When we tell a story we dress the themes and messages up in an elegant wardrobe of fiction and send them out to seduce the audience. Fiction and lying may seem like blood-relations, yet the major function of a lie is to deceive while fiction’s function is to illuminate. The stori...

I hated every metafictional book I have ever had to read for university, but this one was damn impressive and heartwarming. Kudos to this beginning:"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 f...

with faces in the crowd , it seemed rather evident that we'd only begun to see the depths of valeria luiselli's literary talents - given that the young mexican author is barely into her 30s. the story of my teeth (la historia de mis dientes), happily, is as imaginative and richly conceived a novel as her first. if vila-matas, aira, and borges (all of whom figure into the tale) had collaborated together on a book about a storytelling auctioneer with an affection for literature, we might have s...

About 10 pages into his book I was going to consign it to the Do Not Finish section of my library (actually I got it from the public library but you catch my drift… 😉). But I didn’t do a DNF…I kept on going and I am glad I did! This is such a hard book to describe or characterize. Even one of the reviewers’ blurbs at the beginning of the book said as much: “Wonderful and strange, ‘The Story of my Teeth’ transgresses against straightforward storytelling by witnessing and remixing to make somethin...

Pieces of text commissioned by an art gallery from giant industrial juice company Jumex, that should tell you something. The great authors of history never treated a novel as a custom-made product, but as an exploration of the human condition.I find the story of the genesis of this product (book) disturbing: so the original idea was to explore the relation between factory workers and their surroundings with the art gallery, Instead of that we get a postmodern exposition of writers that Luiselli

My three/four star rating is on the fence. I think I don't know enough yet to really review it, so I confess I will have to investigate further. I need to hear more about her and from critics that know more about the situation she is writing about.I heard about this book from many Best of 2015 lists, and liked the concept of the book: The sort of fabulist tale of an auctioneer, Gustavo "Highway" Sanchez, who is actually an auctioneer of famous people's teeth. The text is part novel, part meditat...