Andy Miller

Grubby, funny shaggy dog story

I’ll Sell You a Dog will be reassuringly familiar terrain for fans of Villalobos — satirical, sleazy and head-twistingly smart

The Mexican author Juan Pablo Villa-lobos’s first short novel, Down the Rabbit Hole (Fiesta en la madriguera), was published in English in 2011. It was narrated by the young son of a drug baron living in a luxurious, if heavily guarded palace, whose everyday familiarity with hitmen, prostitutes and assorted methods of disposing of unwanted corpses was both hilarious and unsettling. The novella was the first work of translated fiction to be shortlisted for the (now sadly defunct) Guardian First Book Award and was described admiringly by the writer Ali Smith as ‘funny, convincing, appalling’.

Villalobos’s new novel, his third, has again been translated by Rosalind Harvey, whose work on Down the Rabbit Hole was nominated for the PEN translation prize. Its narrator is a 78-year-old former taco seller, whose zone of confinement is a Mexico City retirement home rather than a drug lord’s fortified hideout; but in most other respects this is familiar terrain for Villalobos fans.I’ll Sell you a Dog is satirical, sleazy and often head-twistingly smart.

Teo, short for Teodoro, lives in a block whose other inhabitants include a lot of cockroaches and a pretentious ‘literary salon’ that meets on the first floor; Teo considers both to be infestations. He keeps a copy of the cultural philosopher Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory to hand, a book with which he is obsessed and which he employs as a weapon, both intellectually and literally, to discourage unwanted callers and to squash cockroaches. The members of the literary salon — who believe, despite his furious protestations to the contrary, that Teo must be a novelist — are working their way through In Search of Lost Time, ‘all seven volumes… 4,230 pages long, hardback, with leaves thin as tracing paper and weighing in at almost three and a half kilos (those with arthritis were excused)’.

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