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Lively patter … Juan Pablo Villalobos.
Photograph: Alejandro García/EPA
Juan Pablo Villalobos, whose debut Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian first book award, hails from Guadalajara in Mexico; in 2003 he moved to Barcelona to do a doctorate in literary theory with the help of an EU grant. The protagonist of his fourth novel is named Juan Pablo Villalobos; he hails from Guadalajara in Mexico, and moves to Barcelona to do a doctorate in literary theory with the help of an EU grant. This starting premise suggests a campus “autofiction” in the vein of Ben Lerner, but things take a rather different turn when Juan Pablo’s wheeler-dealer cousin embroils him in a criminal conspiracy involving some very bad dudes. They compel him to infiltrate a milieu of literary postgrads, with instructions to “learn all the gender studies chitchat” and seduce a student called Laia, the daughter of a wealthy Catalan magnate from whom they hope to extort money.
It just so happens that Juan Pablo’s thesis is on humour in Latin American literature, and his surreal sojourn in the criminal underworld affords him a perfect opportunity for fieldwork: the gangsters’ dialogue, expletive-ridden and almost cartoonishly aggressive, abounds with casually misogynistic and xenophobic banter. The patter is lively and the language intentionally idiosyncratic: in his fascinating afterword, translator Daniel Hahn explains how he adapted the novel’s variety of Hispanic vernaculars – encompassing Argentinian, Catalan and Mexican Spanish – into a series of distinct English registers.
I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me is an eccentric hybrid, combining pulpy crime fiction – there are basement murders, double-crossings, blacked-out cars – with avant-garde archness. Around 200 pages in, a tough warns Juan Pablo: “You’ve gotten this far by sheer fucking fluke, buddy, but you must be on like page two hundred by now and this book has two-fifty at the absolute most.” Literary life comes in for plenty of stick: Laia’s father bonds with one of the gangsters over their shared contempt for “literature people [who] believe in feelings”. Perhaps the real divide isn’t between law abiders and criminals, but between men of action and the feckless dreamers who populate Juan Pablo’s favourite novels. The self-doubt of bookish souls is well trodden ground, but Villalobos’s take on it is refreshingly exuberant.
• I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me by Juan Pablo Villalobos, translated by Daniel Hahn, is published by And Other Stories (RRP £11.99).
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