That all of the characters have names derived from Nahuatl, an indigenous language, can be seen, perhaps, as a connection of these very contemporary events to the history of Mexico. All media coverage of Mexico is mired in reports of drug war violence, a subject that permeates Down the Rabbit Hole. In a sense, Villalobos is trying to write that very book. It must be harder to write that sort of book than the futuristic ones that predict the future. Someone should invent a book that tells you what’s happening at this moment, as you read. This is one of the biggest defects of books. “Books don’t have anything in them about the present, only the past and the future. publisher, and given FSG’s recent publications of Spanish-language literature-books by Andres Neuman, Alejandro Zambra, Roberto Bolaño-this fits right in.Īround the midpoint of Down the Rabbit Hole, the debut novel by Juan Pablo Villalobos (translated by Rosalind Harvey, recently published by FSG, and not to be confused with the mystery novel by Peter Abrahams), the narrator, Tochtli, the young son of a Mexican drug tsar, states: This is a book I first heard about a while back when the innovative and amazing And Other Stories announced that they’d be bringing it out in the UK. The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit Hole, which is translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and available from FSG.
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