Valeria Luiselli
The Story of My Teeth
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Praise for The Story of My Teeth
“The Story of My Teeth is a sly and melancholy romp (yes, romp) that reminds us of the power and sway of great stories, especially those we tell ourselves that, by sheer persistence, we come to believe.”
— STEPHEN SPARKS, GREEN APPLE BOOKS ON THE PARK
“It’s easy to see why Valeria Luiselli was chosen by the National Book Foundation as one of the 5 Under 35 honorees. Within just a few paragraphs of her new novel, The Story of My Teeth, you’ll be completely drawn into the weird and wonderful world of Gustavo ‘Highway’ Sánchez Sánchez. This captivating story is filled with memorable characters and situations, but what is even more intriguing is the background story of how this work was written in collaboration with workers at a Jumex juice factory in Mexico City.”
— SHAWN DONLEY, POWELL’S BOOKS
“The Story of My Teeth fascinates me: An emerging writer collaborates anonymously with a group of juice factory workers to write a story about art, identity, and who can own either. Wonderful and strange, The Story of My Teeth transgresses against straightforward storytelling by witnessing and remixing to make something so fresh and new that it defies easy description. Just know that it dazzles on every page. I love this book.”
— JEREMY ELLIS, BRAZOS BOOKSTORE
“Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth is suffused with a casual, funny intelligence that is neither too showy nor shallow. Like her hero, Gustavo ‘Highway’ Sánchez Sánchez, Luiselli’s tales run tall and askew. Not unlike question marks, they loom larger than any plotted course from their story’s ‘Beginning’ to ‘End.’ Highway is a master auctioneer and Luiselli, a writer — where they meet, and perhaps more appropriately never parted at all, is the ‘Middle.’ A gaping maw, the Middle is fitted with the false teeth Highway wears and sells but is also an expanse of possibilities, where the names dropped are, as they fall, recognizable, and, as they land, something new. In this way, too, Luiselli declares her literary influences without incorporating them or making them purely her own — hitting the page, their names shatter into jumbles whose comedy is also a serious truth about the creation (and valuation) of art. Each step — from influence to art — we find in her stunning new novel is a collaborative effort, whose end begins in a new story somewhere in the Middle.”
— BRAD JOHNSON, DIESEL OAKLAND
“Written in collaboration with the workers at a Mexican juice factory, featuring a delightfully delusional auctioneer, bending styles, playing with references, and challenging the idea of translation, The Story of My Teeth is unlike anything you’ve ever read. With this brilliant, weird, zany second novel, Luiselli has solidified her place as one of the most interesting and imaginative minds putting words on paper today.”
— JOSH COOK, PORTER SQUARE BOOKS
“Lovely, exuberant, and unlike anything you’ve read before, The Story of My Teeth is the story of Gustavo ‘Highway’ Sanchez Sánchez, the self-proclaimed ‘greatest auctioneer in the world.’ Sánchez is a model of self-invention, a worthy successor to Quixote or, at the very least, Sancho Panza. With wondrous prose, Luiselli explores the relationships we have to the objects in our lives, as well as the context of their worth. Bursting with imagination, playfulness, and good-natured invention, The Story of My Teeth is a love letter to stories and the profound act of telling them.”
— MARK HABER, BRAZOS BOOKSTORE
“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 seen something like The Story of My Teeth. Stylistically unique, but squarely centered within the rich tradition of playful, allusive Latin American fiction, Luiselli’s story evinces an enviable flair which belies her age. Like its main character, Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez (affectionately referred to as ‘Highway’ throughout), The Story of My Teeth is, at times, enigmatic, idiosyncratic, magnetizing, and delightfully charming.”
— JEREMY GARBER, POWELL’S BOOKS
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The Story of My Teeth
for the Jumex factory staff
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BOOK I. The Story (Beginning, Middle, and End)
A man may have been named John because that was the name of his father; a town may have been named Dartmouth, because it is situated at the mouth of the Dart. But it is no part of the signification of the word John, that the father of the person so called bore the same name; nor even of the word Dartmouth, to be situated at the mouth of the Dart.
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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, postmortem 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.
Some have luck, some have charisma. I’ve got a bit of both. My uncle, Solón Sánchez Fuentes, a salesman dealing in quality Italian ties, used to say that beauty, power, and early success fade away, and that they’re a heavy burden for those who possess them, because the prospect of their loss is a threat few can endure. I’ve never had to worry about that, because there’s nothing ephemeral in my nature. I have only permanent qualities. I inherited every last jot of my uncle Solón’s charisma, and he also left me an elegant Italian tie. That’s all you need in this life to become a man of pedigree, he said.
I was born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City, with four premature teeth and my body completely covered in a very fine coat of fuzz. But I’m grateful for that inauspicious start, because ugliness, as my other uncle, Eurípides López Sánchez, was given to saying, is character forming. When my father first saw me, he claimed his real son had been taken away by the new mother in the next room. He tried by various means — bureaucracy, blackmail, intimidation — to return me to the nurse who had handed me over. But Mom took me in her arms the moment she saw me: a tiny, brown, swollen blob fish. She had been trained to accept filth as her fate. Dad hadn’t.