Down the Rabbit Hole

by Juan Pablo Villalobos, Rosalind Harvey (Translator), Adam Thirlwell (Introduction)

Overview

Tochtli lives in a palace. He loves hats, samurai, guillotines and dictionaries, and what he wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is a child whose father is a drug baron. This is a darkly comic novel of a delirious journey to grant a child's wish.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781908276285
Publisher:	And Other Stories Publishing
Publication date:	04/29/2014
Pages:	468
Sales rank:	556,381
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 7.88(h) x (d)

About the Author

Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He has researched topics as diverse as the influence of the avant-garde on the work of César Aira and the flexibility of pipelines for electrical installations. He lived in Barcelona for several years where he published his Guardian First Book Award-shortlisted debut, Down the Rabbit Hole, then moved to Brazil, before returning to Spain. He is married with two Mexican-Brazilian-Italian-Catalan children. His fourth novel I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me won Spain’s prestigious Herralde Prize and will be published in English translation in 2019 by And Other Stories.

Read an Excerpt

Some people say I’m precocious. They say it mainly because they think I know difficult words for a little boy. Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic, and devastating. 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. They say I look older. Or the other way around: that I’m too little to know words like that. Or back-to-front and the other way around, sometimes people think I’m a dwarf. But I don’t think I’m precocious. What happens is I have a trick, like magicians who pull rabbits out of hats, except I pull words out of the dictionary. Every night before I go to sleep I read the dictionary. My memory, which is really good, practically devastating, does the rest. Yolcaut doesn’t think I’m precocious either. He says I’m a genius, he tells me: ‘Tochtli, you’re a genius, you little bastard.’ And he ruffles my hair with his fingers covered in gold and diamond rings. Anyway, more people say I’m odd: seven. And just because I really like hats and always wear one. Wearing a hat is a good habit immaculate people have. In the sky there are pigeons doing their business. If you don’t wear a hat you end up with a dirty head. Pigeons have no shame. They do their dirty business in front of everyone, while they’re flying. They could easily do it hidden in the branches of a tree. Then we wouldn’t have to spend the whole time looking at the sky and worrying about our heads. But hats, if they’re good hats, can also be used to make you look distinguished. That is, hats are like the crowns of kings. If you’re not a king you can wear a hat to be distinguished. And if you’re not a king and you don’t wear a hat you end up being a nobody. I don’t think I’m odd for wearing a hat. And oddness is related to ugliness, like Cinteotl says. What I definitely am is macho. For example: I don’t cry all the time because I don’t have a mum. If you don’t have a mum you’re supposed to cry a lot, gallons of tears, two or three gallons a day. But I don’t cry, because people who cry are faggots. When I’m sad Yolcaut tells me not to cry, he says: ‘Chin up, Tochtli, take it like a man.’ Yolcaut is my daddy, but he doesn’t like it when I call him Daddy. He says we’re the best and most macho gang for at least eight kilometres. Yolcaut is a realist and that’s why he doesn’t say we’re the best gang in the universe or the best gang for eight thousand kilometres. Realists are people who think that reality isn’t how you think it is. Yolcaut told me that. Reality is like this and that’s it. Tough luck. The realist’s favourite saying is you have to be realistic. I think we really are a very good gang. I have proof. Gangs are all about solidarity. So solidarity means that, because I like hats, Yolcaut buys me hats, lots of hats, so many that I have a collection of hats from all over the world and from all the different periods of the world. Although now more than new hats what I want is a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. I’ve already written it down on the list of things I want and given it to Miztli. That’s how we always do it, because I don’t go out much, so Miztli buys me all the things I want on orders from Yolcaut. And since Mitzli has a really bad memory I have to write lists for him. But you can’t buy a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia that easily, in a pet shop. The biggest thing they sell in a pet shop is a dog. But who wants a dog? No one wants a dog. It’s so hard to get a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus that it might be the only way to do it is by going to catch one in Liberia. That’s why my tummy is hurting so much. Actually my tummy always hurts, but recently I’ve been getting cramps more often. I think at the moment my life is a little bit sordid. Or pathetic.

Editorial Reviews

"A pint-size novel about innocence, beastliness and a child learning the lingo in a drug wonderland. Funny, convincing, appalling, it’s a punch-packer for one so small." Ali Smith, Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph

"Down the Rabbit Hole is a miniature high-speed experiment with perspective … a deliberate, wild attack on the conventions of literature." Adam Thirlwell

"That rarest of animals, a book that is, to all intents and purposes, perfect." Sarah Churchwell, Book of the Year in the New Statesman

"Juan Pablo Villalobos, channeled Mexico’s drug wars via the voice of a narco-baron’s son in his touching and invigorating Down the Rabbit Hole." Boyd Tonkin, in his round-up of the year’s best fiction, The Independent

"If you’re going to have an imprisoned child narrate a novel, then not so much as a word should be out of place. There are no such slips in Juan Pablo Villalobos’s debut novella. We have here a control over the material which is so tight it is almost claustrophobic. [...] This is a novel about failing to understand the bigger picture, and in its absence we can see it more clearly." Nicholas Lezard, Choice of the Week, The Guardian

"In Villalobos’s small but perfectly formed 2011 debut novel, reality and surreality overlap in a darkly comic tale that offers a fresh take on Mexico’s nasty narco-wars." Laura Diaz, The Best Books on Mexico, The Guardian

"The cumulative parodic effect is chillingly powerful." Edward King, Sunday Times

"Juan Pablo Villalobos brilliantly encapsulates the chaos of a lawless existence in which, under the sway of drug lords, anything might happen and everything goes. [...] Down the Rabbit Hole is an astonishing debut from Villalobos." Lucy Popescu, The Independent

"Villalobos creates Tochtli’s half-corrupt, half-innocent world [...] with a brilliant, tragi-comic light touch." Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

"Refreshingly original" Ángel Gurría-Quintana, FT

"For anyone interested in point of view in creative writing Down the Rabbit Hole is a masterclass." Kate Pullinger

"Mexican author Villalobo’s first novel offers an original and darkly comic portrayal of Mexico’s drugs scene. Translator Rosalind Harvey seamlessly recreates Tochtli’s distinctive voice – with his flights of fancy and half-understood truths, this is clearly the voice of a child, but one who is losing his innocence ahead of his time." Book Trust

"A beautifully realised short novel that narrates the daily life of a powerful drug lord ensconced in his palatial hideaway, seen through the clear eyes of his young son . . . A brief and majestic debut that converts the ‘drug novel’ into a fascinating narrative." Matías Néspolo, El Mundo

"Despite the – apparent – naivety with which the story is told, despite the fact that the child speaks as if he were a child telling a story (and herein lies the irony and acid humour of Villalobos) this child is in actual fact the son of an extremely powerful drugs lord and we quickly recognise the nature of his environment… This is the precise point of view with which Villalobos has chosen to view this narco-reality within a Mexican context." Javier Goñi, El País

"Don’t miss this refreshing little novel, even if it is only to enjoy the delicious literary comfort that allows us to endure the sordid, cruel reality of the world it describes." Enrique García Fuentes, Hoy de Extremadura

"With this book we have discovered Juan Pablo Villalobos, a linguistic virtuoso able to penetrate the elusive world of literature, shedding light on many of its mysteries." José Antonio Aguado, Diari de Terrassa

"Down the Rabbit Hole is an dazzling and unsettling literary exercise… Villalobos plays with a double-edged sword: the horror of our reactions as readers is contrasted with the almost trivial way the narrator describes his daily existence… Down the Rabbit Hole could well become a classic of the genre. A novel that breaks our hearts (which we knew were already broken, but which still hurt) and invites us both to laugh and inevitably to reflect on the political subtext, highly relevant in a contemporary context." Ricardo García Mainou, El Economista

"With Down the Rabbit Hole, Juan Pablo Villalobos has made a dramatic entrance into the literary world. It is a book that must be read for its great aesthetic value and darkly humorous tone. A book that throws a clear light on a dark subject." Teresa García Díaz, Amerika

"Amidst this boom of so-called 'narco-literature,' Villalobos has managed to avoid lapsing into moralism through the voice of his child narrator, which is strange and cruel in its innocence." Gabriela Wiener, El País

From the Publisher