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.

JACK REVIEWS NOVELS to DISTRACT HIMSELF from the INEVITABILITY of DEATH: Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan

OK, right, so I have no idea where to begin with this one. Maybe... OK. On the whole, I really liked Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan. Also, there were many moments during the process of reading Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan that I thought “this book is really, really, really intensely annoying.” About two thirds of the way through this tremendously irritating novel, I realised to my surprise that A) I had made it two thirds of the way though this tremendously irritating novel, and B) I actually cared quite a lot what happened to the three main characters and was turning the pages compulsively. So you will see why this is quite a difficult review to start. From what angle do you approach a novel as baffling, frustrating and occasionally sublime?

I feel about Exciting Times how I think some people feel about Sally Rooney's writing. I am,a Sally Rooney acolyte. I have been profoundly moved by her writing, depressed and uplifted in equal measure, and would hector friends into reading her until the runaway success of Normal People made that quite unnecessary. But it has not escaped my attention that Sally Rooney has her critics. Some of those critics are Will Self and thus can be discounted immediately, but I've heard enough people say they find her characters vapid and self absorbed to understand that it's a legitimate opinion. A wrong opinion of course. They're vapid and self absorbed, in the way that most young people are vapid and self absorbed, but they're also funny and self deprecating and engaged in the messy process of being better people. If you don't like Sally Rooney's characters, you're probably being dishonest with yourself about the way you were in your late teens and early twenties.

But I digress. That's not the point. The point is that the characters in Exciting Times are, in fact, vapid and self absorbed. The book's narrator is Ava - Irish, in her early twenties, doing TEFL in Hong Kong, consumed by varying intensities of despair and self loathing. The plot centres around her love triangle that's not a love triangle, with English banker Julian, and Hong Kong born trainee solicitor Edith. Both are from wealthy backgrounds, while Ava is not. Ava loves and admires Edith, and... to be honest, I'm not sure what she feels about Julian. Like many aspects of this novel, I can't decide whether that's intentional, whether it's because their relationship is nuanced and complex, or needlessly vague. She sort of has a thinly disguised contempt for him but finds his company perversely enjoyable. They fuck semi regularly, and Ava doesn't particularly enjoy it, but doesn't outright dislike it either. They end up living together, an arrangement that more or less works. Julian is a reasonably likeable character and largely avoids the cliches of the privileged banker archetype. He's capable of self parody – at one point he suggests that he'd be more inclined to worship Jesus if he'd founded a start-up. At the same time, he's quite cold and ignorant, and actually, there just isn't much to him. He's not much of anything. He's a bit blank. This might be subtle characterisation from Dolan, it might be bad writing from Dolan, I don't know, I DON'T UNDERSTAND. THIS IS REALLY BLOODY HARD.

I don't understand why Ava loves Edith so much either. Again, she's not much of anything. During her first encounter, we learn that she carries soy milk cartons in her handbag, that she gets very animated when she attempts to explain Chinese geography to Ava on napkins, that she goes to watch plays and then spends her time in the theatre answering e-mails on her phone. Ava slowly becomes smitten. Why? It's not that Edith is unpleasant or anything, and she certainly cares more for Ava than Julian does. There are also glimpses of how Edith's eclectic range of enthusiasms could be charming. Take this sweet observation about Instagram - 

“she said Instagram made her look at everything more closely. Whenever she felt sad, she had a wall of happy memories to look back on.” 

Such sincerity runs counter from what you expect from a novel as frequently cynical as this one, and it does demonstrate that Edith brings something into Ava's life that she's missing. But again, on the whole, there's just not much there. Ava sleeps with Edith and marvels about how little room they take up in bed when their bodies are intertwined. She then observes that 

“she's just spent half a year having quite a lot of sex with a vertically bothersome man. It was all very interesting.” 

It's not. It sounds clever, means nothing. Everyone in this book is the sum total of the sarcastic quips and shallow personality quirks they're allowed. There's no depth to it. Dolan's writing captures the mechanics of liking someone and wondering whether they like you back, but the characters involved feel half formed, and so it's all not quite right. It's like watching incredibly impressive robots flirt.

But could that be the point? The running theme of Exciting Times is that Ava doesn't like herself and is committed to sabotaging her own happiness. She pronounces herself "a bad person" who “could not correctly process emotions.” 

Edith points out to her that 

“you keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special... but you won't allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you're especially bad.” 

It's quite wearisome spending the entirety of a novel in the head of someone like that. Perhaps it doesn't matter who Julian or Edith are as people, and Ava could pick two random strangers (or incredibly impressive robots) off the street and still find herself in the exact same impossible situation; living with someone she on one level despises, falling in love with someone else, and then doing her best to clog up the gears of their relationship. In that case, the vagueness surrounding Julian and Edith's personality makes sense. They're blank canvases for Ava to project her neuroses onto. There's a funny line when Ava sees a picture of a toddler in a mortar and gown at Edith's family home, and immediately (and incorrectly) assumes it's “Edith at a ceremony for child geniuses.” As long as she is capable of making Ava feel insecure and out of her depth, Edith can be absolutely anyone at all.

Anyway, the other key thing to point out is that there are lots of magnificent one liners and observations in Exciting Times. The problem is, roughly 75% of Dolan's sentences are trying so hard to be magnificent one liners and observations. You could flip to any page and find exquisite sentences. To prove my point, I used a random number generator to pick a page in the book. I got page 36, which features the following:

“That night I spent longer than usual pretending not to want him in ways that made it obvious I did. It wasn't as much fun as I usually found it, or as satisfying as I knew slicing a machete through a row of his shirts would be, but I enjoyed the clarity of the exercise.”

And then, the very next sentence is:

“There was something Shakespearean about imperious men going down on you: the mighty have fallen.”

And then, this dialogue at the bottom of the page:

“'In Victorian times,' I said, 'women cut off a lock of hair and gave it to men to keep.'
'I don't want your hair.' '
I'm just describing the practice.'
'Right. Good description. I still don't want your hair.'”

Now, all these excerpts are pretty brilliant. The image of Ava taking a machete to Julian's shirts is hilarious; the Shakespeare joke is oddly profound; the exchange about locks of hair is a winning example of the bone dry sense of humour that courses through this book. The problem, though, is that these sentences don't exist in isolation. They swim in a sea of other, similar sentences that are also trying to stop you in your tracks, on every, single, page. Every single character's voice is laden with this odd mixture of eloquence and expertly executed sarcasm. The cumulative effect is exhausting.

And yet. And yet. Exciting Times is special. It's distinctive, it's brave, it's like nothing else you'll read this year (obviously I think the comparison with Sally Rooney earlier is valid in the macro, but the experience of reading this and, say, Normal People is totally different).. It might be a work of genius. I'm almost certain it's not, but I'm not discounting the possibility. At times, Dolan's writing is exhilarating, and as abrasive as she is, Ava is so engaging that I suspect the texts I sent to my friends while I was reading Exciting Times sound a bit like her. She can be extremely funny; look out for the conversation at the start of Chapter. 15 when she tells her mother she's dating a banker. Or her rationale for not reading the poetry Julian wrote at university; 

“I was worried the poems would be bad and I'd have to keep living in his apartment.” 

Even the self loathing has its moments, such as her insistence that Julian finding her attractive is 

“a hideous miscalculation given that (I am) in fact the worst human on any conceivable axis.” 

And I don't want to discount all her sadness as mere navel gazing. For example, there's a heartbreaking observation about only wanting to be seen holding Edith's hand by people who won't hurt them for it. Even as one of those awful cis het white men they have now, lines like that always stop me in my tracks. The combined effect of all this, the jokes and the pain and the strangeness, is magnified by the curt chapter lengths. If you're like me, the effect of being able to blast through 10 chapters in 50 pages will be that you try and do exactly that. But perhaps this novel is best enjoyed in little fragments, one or two a day. That's the best way of appreciating each joke, each carefully crafted sentence, without the unrelenting intensity of Ava's voice wearing you down.

Ultimately, what I will say for Exciting Times is that there is not one single sentence in the book that is boring. The fact that Dolan is straining to do something quirky with every line is its most glaring flaw, but I'll always prefer a novel that is bad in interesting ways to a novel that is outright boring. And for all its faults, Exciting Times is a million miles away from a bad novel. It is addictive, laugh out loud funny, and curiously moving. If/when Naoise Dolan writes a new novel, I suspect I will buy it on the day of release. I just wish it wasn't such an effort to get to that realisation.