I Don't Expect Anyone To Believe Me

Like some literary Buster Keaton, Villalobos''s impassive façade will have you in stitches in this reality-twisting immigrant''s tale.I don''t expect anyone to believe me," warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villal... Read more

Like some literary Buster Keaton, Villalobos''s impassive façade will have you in stitches in this reality-twisting immigrant''s tale.I don''t expect anyone to believe me," warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villalobos. He is about to fly to Barcelona on a scholarship when he''s kidnapped in a bookshop and whisked away by thugs to a basement. The gangsters are threatening his cousin - a wannabe entrepreneur known to some as "Projects" and to others as "dickhead" - who is gagged and tied to a chair. The thugs say Juan Pablo must work for them. His mission? To make Laia, the daughterof a corrupt politician, fall in love with him. He accepts. . . . though not before the crime boss has forced him at gunpoint into a discussion on the limits of humour in literature. Part campus novel, part gangster thriller, I Don''t Expect Anyone to Believe Me is Villalobos at his best. Exuberantly foul-mouthed and intellectually agile, this hugely entertaining novel finds the light side of difficult subjects - immigration, corruption, family loyalty and love - in a world where the difference between comedy and tragedy depends entirely on who''s telling the joke." Less