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A review by leerazer
Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos
3.0
What's it really like to grow up the child of a Mexican drug lord? Heck if I know, but Villalobos here creates a somewhat surreal portrait of it through the voice of young Tochtli in this bite-sized novella. The things we learn about are:
*)The isolation. "There aren't really that many people who say I'm precocious. The problem is I don't know that many people. I know maybe thirteen or fourteen people, and four of them say I'm precocious."
*)The unusual parent-child conversations. "I know all this from a game Yolcaut and I play. It's a question-and-answer game. One person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell. 'One bullet in the heart.' 'Corpse.' 'Thirty bullets in the little toenail of the left foot.' 'Alive.' 'Three bullets in the pancreas.' 'Too early to tell.'"
*)Politics. "The Governor is a man who thinks he governs the people who live in a state. Yolcaut says the Governor doesn't govern anyone, not even his fucking mother. In any case the Governor is a nice man, although he has a tuft of white hair in the middle of his head that he doesn't shave off. I had fun listening to Yolcaut and the Governor talking. But the Governor didn't. His face was all red, as if it were going to explode, because I was eating some quesadillas while they had green pozole and talked about their cocaine business."
*)Suspicion. "Yolcaut watched the news with me and when it was over he said some enigmatic things to me. First he said: 'Ah, they suicided her.' And then, when he'd stopped laughing: 'Think the worst and you'll be right.'
*)Expensive trips. "A Monrovian guide is good for three things: so you don't get lost in Monrovia, so you don't get killed in Monrovia, and for finding Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. That's why he's charging us a lot of money, millions of dollars I think. Because it turns out that finding Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses isn't easy, even in Liberia."
*)The isolation. "There aren't really that many people who say I'm precocious. The problem is I don't know that many people. I know maybe thirteen or fourteen people, and four of them say I'm precocious."
*)The unusual parent-child conversations. "I know all this from a game Yolcaut and I play. It's a question-and-answer game. One person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell. 'One bullet in the heart.' 'Corpse.' 'Thirty bullets in the little toenail of the left foot.' 'Alive.' 'Three bullets in the pancreas.' 'Too early to tell.'"
*)Politics. "The Governor is a man who thinks he governs the people who live in a state. Yolcaut says the Governor doesn't govern anyone, not even his fucking mother. In any case the Governor is a nice man, although he has a tuft of white hair in the middle of his head that he doesn't shave off. I had fun listening to Yolcaut and the Governor talking. But the Governor didn't. His face was all red, as if it were going to explode, because I was eating some quesadillas while they had green pozole and talked about their cocaine business."
*)Suspicion. "Yolcaut watched the news with me and when it was over he said some enigmatic things to me. First he said: 'Ah, they suicided her.' And then, when he'd stopped laughing: 'Think the worst and you'll be right.'
*)Expensive trips. "A Monrovian guide is good for three things: so you don't get lost in Monrovia, so you don't get killed in Monrovia, and for finding Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. That's why he's charging us a lot of money, millions of dollars I think. Because it turns out that finding Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses isn't easy, even in Liberia."