Description
Book SynopsisLong before he was the taco seller whose ‘Gringo Dog’ recipe made him famous throughout Mexico City, our hero was an aspiring artist: an artist, that is, till his would-be girlfriend was stolen by Diego Rivera, and his dreams snuffed out by his hypochondriac mother. Now our hero is resident in a retirement home, where fending off boredom is far more gruelling than making tacos. Plagued by the literary salon that bumps about his building’s lobby and haunted by the self-pitying ghost of a neglected artist, Villalobos’ old man can’t help but misbehave. He antagonises his neighbours, tortures American missionaries with passages from Adorno, flirts with the revolutionary greengrocer, and in short does everything that can be done to fend off the boredom of retirement and old age . . . while still holding a beer.
A delicious take-down of pretensions to cultural posterity, I’ll Sell You a Dog is a comic novel whose absurd inventions, scurrilous antics and oddball characters are vintage Villalobos.
Trade Review‘I'll Sell You A Dog is a reminder of how effortless literature should be to love. This unexpected ride through a character's second childhood, his building, neighbourhood and history is so magically twisted that it could be real. As ever Villalobos writes a peephole through politics and time, to simply watch us dance in all our lurid whimsy.' * DBC Pierre *
‘Villalobos subjects the colourful and at times very funny plot to a rigorously, gracefully applied style, which never projects reality but rather, sentence by sentence, constructs a parallel reality upon it . . . Nothing is real and yet at the same time, everything is recognisable . . . Villalobos has found a tone and a rhythm all his own, unlike anything else in Mexican fiction today. He makes the reader laugh at the absurd and as he does so, he reveals the senselessness of the world.’ -- Fernando García Ramírez * Letras Libras *
‘With this, his third novel, Villalobos is confirmed as the definition of new Mexican literature.’ -- Matías Néspolo * El Mundo *
‘Villalobos’s farce spares no one. And with the laughter there emerges a compassion for people living marginal lives which positions the novel on the side of the unexpected and unknown, as the novel demands the imagination’s autonomy over reality, thus rebuking the conventions of fiction in a way that is as stimulating as the novel’s humour.’ -- Francisco Solano * El Pais *
