The Story of My Teeth

 
 
The Story of My Teeth

by Valeria Luiselli
translated by Christina MacSweeney

Coffee House Press

2013, reprinted 2015
 

  

The Story of My Teeth is a kind of rollicking first-person narrative telling the life story of Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez. Gustavo has a larger-than-life personality. He's a former security guard, an auctioneer, a collector of knickknacks, a raconteur, a teller of tall tales, a man about town, a storyteller but also a bullshitter. As a character and the book's narrator, he's fun to read. The book was originally written in Spanish, and it's set in a suburb of Mexico City.

 

The Story of My Teeth is divided into a handful of chapters, and moves across the unpredictably. In the first chapter, Gustavo tells most of his life story. He grew up poor, got a job as a security guard at a juice factory, eventually got a promotion to crisis manager. He met a rich woman and lived as her kept husband, learned auctioneering, got divorced. As an auctioneer, he made his own money, bought a house and a collection of curios, including a supposed set of Marylin Monroe's teeth, which he paid to have implanted in place of his own.

 

The next chapter shows a single auction, where Gustavo sells off ten of his own teeth while claiming they each belonged to a different famous historical figure, from Plato to Virginia Woolfe. We get to read a vignette for each one. At the end of the chapter, Gustavo meets his long-estranged son, now an adult who works at the art gallery adjoining the juice factory.

 

In the third chapter, Gustavo wakes up drugged and disoriented in an art gallery. His son has removed all his teeth and stolen all the collected tchotchkes out of his house. Gustavo meets an aspiring young writer and makes him his apprentice; we learn that the first chapter was written by the apprentice taking dictation.

 

Chapter four has another auction! Gustavo and his apprentice break back into the gallery to steal back his teeth and some other things to resell. Gustavo makes up entirely fictional stories about the origin of each object to tell at auction, and we get those vignettes too.

 

The fifth chapter is a posthumous retelling of Gustavo's life by his apprentice. Seen from the outside, and without Gustavo's grandiosity, it all looks a bit smaller and sadder. This one is illustrated with photos of the real neighborhood where the book takes place. The sixth and final chapter was written by the translator, not the author. It's a timeline that covers Gustavo's life, key events in Mexican history that overlap with it, and anniversaries of events in the lives of the famous people Gustavo references in his tale telling.

 

Gustavo is an enjoyable narrator, and via his fictional auction catalogs, we get a collection of very short stories within the larger narrative. A running theme is the question of how much the value of objects depends on the objects themselves and how much depends on the stories we tell about them - and relatedly, how much depends on the truth of those stories. Gustavo freely quotes and tells anecdotes about real philosophers and other thinkers, often claiming them as his uncles or cousins. Jean Paul Sartre becomes cousin Juan Pablo Sanchez Sartre, for example, a whiny brat who yells at the other relatives that spending time with them is hell. There's also a fair number of quotes and anecdotes specifically about teeth.

 

The story of how The Story of My Teeth was written, explained by author Valeria Luiselli in the afterward, is nearly as interesting as the book itself. Jumex is a juice factory in Ecatepec, Mexico. Ecatepec neighbors Mexico City, and the way it's spoken about in the text makes me think it's a bit like the Jersey City to Mexico City's NYC. Some of the profits of the factory have been spent to amass a contemporary art collection in a private gallery next door. Luiselli got a commission from the gallery, and wanted to write something about the connection between the factory workers and the collected art. After she wrote each chapter, a book club made up of factory workers met to read and discuss it. She incorporated their ideas and feedback into her revisions and used them as her basis to write each new chapter, making them true collaborators. Some even took the photos that appear in the book.