The Mexican author Juan Pablo Villa-lobos’s first short novel, Down the Rabbit Hole (Fiesta en la madriguera), was published in English in 2011. It was narrated by the young son of a drug baron living in a luxurious, if heavily guarded palace, whose everyday familiarity with hitmen, prostitutes and assorted methods of disposing of unwanted corpses was both hilarious and unsettling. The novella was the first work of translated fiction to be shortlisted for the (now sadly defunct) Guardian First Book Award and was described admiringly by the writer Ali Smith as ‘funny, convincing, appalling’.
Villalobos’s new novel, his third, has again been translated by Rosalind Harvey, whose work on Down the Rabbit Hole was nominated for the PEN translation prize. Its narrator is a 78-year-old former taco seller, whose zone of confinement is a Mexico City retirement home rather than a drug lord’s fortified hideout; but in most other respects this is familiar terrain for Villalobos fans.I’ll
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