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.
The Story of My Teeth is divided into six sections (plus a series of photographs and a bonus “Chronologic” added by the book's translator) and I found the first of these sections (“The Story”) to be delightful: dripping with irony and absurdity, it was just off-kilter enough to pique my interest. But as the sections proceeded, the tone eventually wore on me, something began to drag the story down, and when I read the author's afterword about the book's creation (details to follow), I realised that the problem I had with The Story of My Teeth is that it's just too deliberate and self-aware; too manufactured to come across as relatably human. I picked this up not realising that I had read Valeria Luiselli before (Lost Children Archive) and both of these books suffer from the same sort of novel-as-art-installation-project that I can find alienating; Luiselli is making art, but it's not really to my taste.
I wasn’t just a lowly seller of objects but, first and foremost, a lover and collector of good stories, which is the only honest way of modifying the value of an object. End of declaration.Set in a suburb of Mexico City, Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, known as “Highway”, worked as a guard, and then a counselor, at a juice factory until, at forty-two, he decided to learn auctioneering. Leaving his wife and baby son behind, Highway studied auctioneering in America and returned to become very successful, wealthy, and at the height of his powers, replaced his own shamefully uneven teeth with those said to have belonged to Marilyn Monroe. Asked to help a local parish by auctioning off some of his own collectibles, Highway demonstrates how it's stories that create value in items (asserting that the individual teeth he's selling belonged to such notables as Plato and Virginia Woolf), and when he sees his now grown son in attendance, Highway puts himself on the auction block. When his son then becomes vengeful, Highway hires a young novelist to write his dental autobiography. End of plot summary.
I need you to write my story, the story of my teeth. I tell it to you, you just write it. We sell millions, and I get my teeth fixed for good. Then, when I die, you write about that too. Because a man's story is never complete until he dies. End of that task.Along with the six sections of straight narrative that the book is divided into, The Story of My Teeth includes a number of pages with fortune-cookie fortunes, some fairly inscrutable epigraphs, a section at the end with photographs of actual locations from the book, and endless referencing of other literary works (which are attributed to such writers as Miguel Sánchez Foucault, Marcelo Sánchez Proust, and Fredo Sánchez Dostoyevsky; a joke that grows old fast). Nothing about this reads like a familiar novel.
So, how this book came to be: Valeria Luiselli was commissioned to write a work of fiction for the catalogue of the Galería Jumex; an experimental art gallery located in a juice factory in the “marginalized, wasteland-like neighborhood of Ectepec”. Luiselli wrote the first section (which I really liked) and it was then read aloud to the workers at the juice factory, a recording was made of their reactions, and based on that feedback (and integrating the workers' personal anecdotes), Luiselli wrote the next section, and so on. In this way, she refers to this effort as a collaboration between everyone involved (“a reverse Duchampian procedure”), and as for the Chronologic section – which is a timeline of real and imagined events from the years of Highway's narrative – added entirely by her English translator, Christina MacSweeney, Luiselli writes that it is, “a map, an index, and a glossary for the book, which both destabilized the obsolete dictum of the translator's invisibility and suggests a new way of engaging with translation”. And all of this is apparent in the result: The Story of My Teeth was experimentally manufactured from disparate bits, intended for the catalogue of an art gallery that once hosted a room whose four walls were each entirely taken up by a video of a different bored clown doing little more than periodically sighing or blinking (an exhibit both described in the narrative and featured in one of the ensuing photographs). If you're intrigued by that exhibit, this book might be a perfect fit for you; like, both are art, but not for me.
When the bar was starting to close the owner would let Highway auction his stories. It was at Secret of Night that Highway finally put into practice the now full-fledged theory of his famous allegoric method, where it is not objects that are sold, but the stories that give them value and meaning.And then I'm left wondering about this story that Luiselli tells us at the end of her book and relate it back to Highway's philosophy – is her novel “worth” more or less to me because I know about the commission and the collaboration and the deliberate experimentation? Is a pile of pitted and yellowed teeth worth more if they once belonged to a famous philosopher or actress? Is all value to be found in the stories we attach to items instead of reflecting something inherent in the items themselves? The whole thing could be a hoax that Luiselli is playing on the reader (a reverse reverse Duchampian procedure), but any way you look at it, it's using manipulation to provoke a response (which, of course, all fiction does), and I can't say that I enjoyed the experience overall.
