Author(s): Valeria Luiselli

Novel

Gustavo 'Turnpike' Sanchez is a man with a mission: he is planning to replace every last one of his unsightly teeth. Studying auctioneering under Grandmaster Oklahoma and the famous country singer Leroy Van Dyke, Highway travels the world, amassing his collection of 'collectibles' and perfecting his own specialty: the allegoric auction. In his quest for a perfect set of pearly whites, he finds unusual ways to raise the funds, culminating in the sale of the jewels of his collection: the teeth of the 'notorious infamous' - Plato, Petrarch, Chesterton, Virginia Woolf et al. 'The Story of My Teeth' is an idiosyncratic journey that offers an insightful meditation on value, worth and creation, and the points at which they overlap.

“Once in bed, the blankets pulled up to my chest, I reach with my right hand under the pillow and draw out the book – the way a cowboy would draw a pistol from under his pillow, but a bit more slowly.” From his job as a security guard at a juice factory, Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez, augured by Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, aspires to improve his lot by studying to become an auctioneer (learning the differing styles of auctioneering: hyperbolics, parabolics, circulars, allegorics and elliptics). After some success in the US, he returns to Mexico, having replaced his teeth with a set that once belonged to Marilyn Munro. After a charity auction in which he sells his old teeth as having been those of various famous writers, he falls into the hands of his estranged son and then meets a young writer who he commissions to write his story (and who later tells Sanchez’ story from the outside too). Of course, what is ostensibly about auctioneering is in fact about the writing, and the various sections of the book are in turn hyperbolic, parabolic, circular, allegoric and elliptic (a further section, chronologic, is added by the translator Christina McSweeney). Furthermore, the book had its origin in a commission Luiselli undertook to build connection between a contemporary art gallery and the workers in the juice factory that owned it, and much of the book arose out of collaborations between Luiselli (posing as Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez) and the workers, spliced with content from artworks and actual locations and people of the city of Ecatepec, as well cameo appearances by other (mainly Latin American) writers (or at least by characters with their names). Luiselli in various ways bridges, or dissolves the distinction between, writer and reader, art and labour, meaning and farce, and the book falls in texture somewhere between Borges and Kharms (probably a little closer to Kharms). Where Duchamp assailed the status of art by placing a urinal in a gallery, Luiselli undertakes a kind of reverse Duchampism by taking art from the gallery and literature from the pantheon and using them as the grist for quotidian lives. What results when large things are placed in small vessels? Sanchez is a wonderfully limited narrator, and Luiselli, with the lightest of touches, demonstrates the creative mileage to be made from limitation and constraint. Often very funny, there is philosophy behind the farce, and, as the reader will learn, “real writers never show their teeth”.

{THOMAS}