JACK REVIEWS NOVELS to DISTRACT HIMSELF from the INEVITABILITY of DEATH: I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Book Review Master List

I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me, by Juan Pablo Villalobos, is a novel at once angry, profound, and silly. This is a book about casual racism, poverty, corruption, and a fashionable European city too complacent to think it needs to worry about such things. It's also a novel with lots of metafictional in-jokes, and gleefully immature bursts of foul language. It's an eccentric gangster thriller, but also not that at all. In short, it's a book of contradictions, and it's weird.

Villalobos' novels have won praise from the likes of Ali Smith and Roxane Gay, and he has been a judge for the International Dublin Literary Award. First published in Spanish in 2018, and now translated into English by Daniel Hahn, his newest follows a Mexican student named, amusingly, Juan Pablo Villalobos (to avoid confusion, I will follow Hahn's lead from his essay on the process of translating the novel, and refer to the author as 'Villalobos,' and the book's main character as 'Juan Pablo'). He and his girlfriend Valentina are about to move from Mexico to Barcelona, where he will write his thesis on “the limits of humour in Latin American literature of the twentieth century.” Unfortunately, before he can get there he runs into trouble with gangsters, who murder his sleazy cousin, known as 'Projects,' and then attempt to hijack his trip for their own nefarious ends. Juan Pablo finds this very stressful, and spends much of the novel insisting to people that the unsightly rashes on his face are a symptom of an obscure allergy, and not, as everyone else can see, Dermatitis Nervosa. Yet even had everything gone to plan with JP's trip, perhaps those rashes would have broken out eventually. After all, the Barcelona of this novel is not the Barcelona of the tourist board.

For a start, almost everyone is a bit racist, even Juan Pablo himself, with his belief that all Chinese people look the same, or his assumption that the Pakistani man he sees on the street will try and sell him hashish. Elsewhere, a character known only as The Chinaman' tells Juan Pablo that the rent is so expensive in the San Gervasio area of the city because “they haven't got Africans or gypsies there.” The chief of police brands homeless Italians as “trash” who think “Barcelona's a sewer where they can show up to dump all their crap, specially since Berlusconi started sorting them out.” When Valentina is browsing at a supermarket, a woman assumes that she actually works at the store and expects her to help her carry her shopping. Trying to justify her mistake, the woman makes “a gesture encompassing her face to indicate, metaphorically, (Valentina's) features and the colour of (her) skin.” Then, to add insult to injury, she attempts to compliment Valentina with the phrase “but you're very pretty.” There are many more examples I could list. The fact that everyone in the book is capable of behaving so ignorantly, including the character Villalobos has named after himself, prevents anyone from taking an irritating moral high ground. I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me will never be accused of being holier than thou. At the same time, the main issue with this otherwise impressive book is that the almost complete absence of sympathetic characters, combined with its frenetic pacing, makes it a slightly exhausting read.

There are plenty of examples in this novel of characters inadvertently revealing their own prejudice, but fewer of them embracing it. One exception comes when the gangsters force Juan Pablo to shoot a private detective hired to tail them. Asked if he has any last words, the detective spits out, in front of two Mexicans, a Pakistani and a Chinese, “filthy cunt immigrants.” Daniel Hahn notes in his essay at the end of the book that after having translated 32 c-words into the book, he then decided to pare it down to just this one usage. When I asked him why, he said his decision came from showing the manuscript to an American friend - “the use in the US is different – not just that it's very strong and taboo, but it's used differently. So I had no problem with the offensiveness of it... but with the fact that US readers would not be offended but would actually be momentarily confused.” With the detective being a character that otherwise barely speaks in the novel, Hahn didn't have to worry about the consistency of his voice, and so he was chosen to drop the sole, precious C-bomb. It really works too, as a moment of pure venom in a novel where even the darker moments usually come with a surreal edge. Villalobos is an unsentimental writer, and he smuggles his most direct commentary on the racism simmering below the surface of Catalan society in a moment where you'd be forgiven for not noticing it, where the immigrants are ostensibly the villains – the detective is, after all, about to be executed by them.

The most enjoyably odious personality in the book is Juan Pablo's mother. She's represented by a series of letters she writes to her son, during which she exclusively describes herself in the third person as 'your mother.' Despite only referring to herself by how she relates to Juan Pablo, she is entirely self regarding, self pitying, and self obsessed. At the funeral of Projects, she claims that all people could talk about was Juan Pablo's move to Barcelona. She says that his cousins are “dying of jealousy now you live in Europe.” Mexico is seen as a dead end place to be, and Europe an entire continent of bounteous possibility - “they've stayed behind in this dilapidated old country, managing their car washes and their motels... and there you are living it up in Europe.” She makes things even more explicit when, in the book's epilogue, she complains that “it came as quite an unpleasant surprise to your mother discovering that even in Europe there are people with quite so little class, people who are common, coarse, uncultured.” As Juan Pablo himself wearily notes, “my mother would never believe European seagulls feed on garbage, too.”

This is intended to be a positive book review, but thus far I've mostly talked about how grotesque all the people are. It might be worth mentioning there are exceptions. There's Ahmed, a thoughtful, gay Pakistani atheist who is in league with the gangsters, but is mostly preoccupied by looking after the dead detective's dog Viridiana, Him aside, Valentina is comfortably the book's most likeable character. Her life ruined by Juan Pablo's erratic behaviour, she sinks into poverty when he breaks up with her, and takes a job at a Mexican restaurant. She quits after one shift because, in her words, “I didn't leave my family just to put up with people treating me like an under-developed cockroach because the food's too spicy.” Those of us who have worked customer service jobs will relate.

It's also worth mentioning that Villalobos is often whimsical and playful, which helps undercut some of the more intense aspects of the book. Juan Pablo may say things like “my ability to identify architectural styles goes all to hell when I'm stressed,” but alongside such pretensions, he has some superb observations. Commenting on Ahmed, who has started to believe Viridiana is talking to him in Catalan, he remarks “his survival strategy (disconnecting from reality) might actually be healthier than mine (suffering a nervous breakdown).” This suggestion seems particularly relevant considering at time of writing, we're at the start of an indefinite lockdown to halt the spread of Coronavirus. At one point, Juan Pablo tries to distract himself from the itchy rashes that have sprouted on his body by reciting the names of Mexican revolutionary writers, “as though I really believed in the power of the mind over the body, as though I didn't know that this power does exist but only the other way round.” This is a sublime, and hideously truthful joke. The first thing you're taught about literature when you start to study it seriously is never to equate the narratorial voice with the author, but Villalobos dares such comparisons by naming Juan Pablo after himself. As it turns out, Villalobos is not himself that knowledgeable about architecture or Mexican revolutionary writers. According to him, neither of them “have any autobiographical echo; rather, they're parodic, what one would suppose a character like Juan Pablo (and like me) ought to know.” I think that's an even better answer than the one about I was expecting, about Villalobos' long held obsession with Brutalism or something.

The area where the book best achieves an equilibrium between its impish humour and its intellectual seriousness is when it starts to deconstruct the novel as a form. While writing in her personal diary, Valentina observes “private writing is so deceitful that I'm already justifying myself as though these pages might one day be read by someone. Or worse, as though they were going to be published.” If Valentina is actually out there, reading this review, then I'm sorry about the turn this has taken. When the sheer absurdity of his new and not even slightly improved life starts to overwhelm him, Juan Pablo starts recording everything that's happened to him “as if I was writing a novel, as if my implausible life could ever be the material for a novel.” Eventually, Valentina breaks into his apartment and finds this document on his computer, with the title 'I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me,' a phrase she herself used in one of her diary entries. It all builds to a spectacular final chapter where Valentina attempts to convince a sympathetic detective, Leia, of the veracity of Juan Pablo's 'novel.' This conversation ends up obliterating the fourth wall and is a deeply enjoyable culmination of Villalobos' previous nods and winks. What all this implies is that someone has gained access to Valentina's diary, Juan Pablo's laptop, and the letters they have received from Projects and Juan Pablo's mother. They have then pieced them together into a coherent novel. Which raises the tantalising question - who could be doing this?

If you've been paying attention, it's hardly a spoiler to reveal that Villalobos has no interest in providing tidy resolutions come the book's conclusion. In this and many other respects, I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me is reminiscent of Paul Auster's spellbinding City of Glass. It is a supremely intelligent shaggy dog story wrapped up as a crime caper. Beyond that, it's also a raw examination of the dark heart of Barcelona, and the precariousness of life there if you're poor or an immigrant. Reading it is like watching, say, Uncut Gems – stressful, but pretty compelling. You won't read anything else like it this year.