Mexican corruption

 

 

Juan Pablo Villalobos, a Mexican comic novelist who writes about Mexican violence  and impunity, blending satire with flights of imagination.

The fourth novel of Juan Pablo Villalobos,  I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, is chaotic but intense narrative. The story is about a Mexican student who becomes embroiled in a gangsters’ turf war with Mexicans, Italians and Catalans vying for control of Barcelona. Villalobos highlights  the effects of lawlessness  in Mexico and how  quickly corrupt forces can infiltrate even august institutions, as some of Villalobos’s criminal characters have degrees and wear suits, effectively rendering themselves invisible.

Juan who is enrolled into study literature at Barcelona’s Autonoma UNI, is first picked up in Guadalajara in Gandhi, a well-known Mexican bookshop.  His life is transformed when he witnesses his cousin’s murder and is coerced into taking his place. The criminal organisation compels Juan, under pain of death,  to change his adviser  and the subject of his doctoral thesis and ordered to make a fellow student , Lala, the lesbian daughter of famous Catalan politician to fall in love with him.

Juan accepts  though not before the crime boss has forced him at gunpoint into a discussion on the limits of humour  in literature. Part campus novel, part ganster thriller, is exuberantly foul-mouthed and intellectually agile, featuring varied subjects from immigration, corruption family loyalty and love in a world where the difference between comedy and tragedy depends entirely on who’s telling the joke.

Jaun’s girlfriend  Valentina accompanies him to Barcelona but, repe3lled buy his behaviour, she moves out and starts shadowing him around the city.

Juan’s mother’s hilarious emails which sound as though she onto a continuous conversation “Son, you know you are your mother’s favourite child, but don’t tell your sister, and your mother will deny it if you do”.

 

 

 

I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me by Juan Pablo Villalobos, Translated by Dabniel Hahn, And Other Stories, £11.99