Valeria Luiselli's extraordinary The Story of My Teeth recounts the life of Gustavo "Highway" Sanchez and his quest for a mouth full of straight and gleaming bone. When we meet him at the beginning of the novel he is, he tells us, "the best auctioneer in the world". He also hints that he might be speaking posthumously, that by the time he has reached the end of his tale "it will no longer be my place to say anything in the first person. I will be a dead man, a happy, enviable man."
Most of this story is told by way of a series of first-person chapters narrated by Gustavo, whose voice carries us from his days as an ugly child in Pachuca all the way through to adulthood, which sees him embark on a series of marriages, a serendipitous job as a security guard (in which he becomes a kind of Chief Comforter), a failed attempt to become a dancer, a course in philology and finally on a life as the greatest auctioneer of his day. He owes his success in this field, he says, to the fact that he sees himself not as “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”. Accordingly, when he comes to sell off his extracted teeth he does so by way of a method he calls “hyperbolics”, whereby he attaches to each tooth the “hypertrue story of one of my favourite people”.
This method results in a lovely and lightly fictionalised account of the place of teeth in literary and philosophical history (we encounter anecdotes about Plato, Augustine, Petrarch, Montaigne) and in a broader exploration of how the power of story and a determination to focus on apparently negligible detail (“God is in the details of teeth,” says Gustavo) can help us to shape and understand both the world and ourselves. For Gustavo, teeth are both histories and synecdoches: “the teeth are the true windows to the soul … the tabula rasa on which all our vices and all our virtues are inscribed”. Yet they also function as objects that can occasion story, meaning, acts of self-creation.
Much of the enjoyment to be found in this novel arises from the feeling that Gustavo regards himself as a kind of creation. He is forever self-mythologising, forever alerting us to his qualities (“But all of that was still in the future, and I am a patient man”, “As I’ve already said, I am a lucky man”, “I can stand an egg upright on a table”). One of Luiselli’s many strengths is her ability to embody that quality in Gustavo’s voice while surrendering none of his authenticity or humanity. She can also write wonderfully arresting descriptive prose, as in her depiction of Gustavo at an auction interrupting his own speech to make way for a cheer: “I paused for applause. But the audience merely regarded me with the silent scepticism of cattle.”
This kind of writing – direct and gentle, affectionate and satirical, precise and imaginative, memorable and efficient – appears throughout, and the character of Gustavo is brought to life with exquisite imaginative power and beautifully judged tics and cadences – my favourite being his habit of rounding off his declarations, comments, stories with terse terminal statements: “End of declaration”, “End of comment”, “End of story”.
When we do reach the end of the story, the narrative shifts into the third person and the weather of the novel – not always cloudless anyway – darkens. In these pages we encounter Gustavo, and the stories of his life and teeth, retrospectively. Questions arise about the nature of the man whose dental autobiography we think we have been reading – questions about the nature of his true self, about the contours of his life and about the realities of his silent anxieties and private dreams. Yet we are also invited to consider again his belief in the power of stories to reshape worlds, his commitment to the value of attentiveness, invention, imagination. These qualities are apparent in all of Luiselli's work. In The Story of My Teeth they are present in a particularly concentrated, luminous, exuberant and resonant way. It is a sad, beautiful and brilliant book. It will endure. End of review.
This book is available on Amazon.
Matthew Adams is a London-based reviewer who writes for the TLS, the Spectator and the Literary Review.
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