The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli
Published 2013 · 33,342 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Experimental Fiction
How hard is The Story of My Teeth to read?
The Story of My Teeth scores 66 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Luiselli's prose — in Christina MacSweeney's translation — maintains a deliberately accessible, spoken quality that suits the braggart narrator Highway's voice. The vocabulary is varied and sometimes playful, drawing on Mexican vernacular, auction-house jargon, and casual literary allusion (Quintilian, Suetonius, Frege), but the register stays colloquial rather than rarefied. Readers will encounter occasional Spanish names and untranslated cultural markers, but the overall lexical demand is moderate.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Sentences are predominantly short, declarative, and anecdotal — written as if transcribed from speech. The narrator's habit of appending brief, blunt summary clauses ('End of memory,' 'End of declaration,' 'Et cetera, et cetera') creates a rhythmic chopped-up quality. There is little syntactic subordination or periodic sentence construction; the complexity lies more in structure and reference than in sentence-level grammar.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- The novel operates through concrete, deadpan anecdote, but its project is highly abstract: it interrogates the nature of value, storytelling, identity, and how objects acquire meaning through narrative. Highway's hyperbolic auction method — assigning famous owners' names to his own teeth — literalizes the philosophical question of how signifier and signified relate. These ideas run throughout the book without ever becoming ponderous, but readers alert to them will find a genuinely abstract layer beneath the picaresque surface.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Each short chapter compresses multiple events, names, and associative digressions. The novel is brief but dense with allusion — epigraphs from Mill, Frege, Wittgenstein, Suetonius; cameos by real Mexican writers and artists under their own names; embedded auction-catalog vignettes featuring Plato, Augustine, Rousseau, Woolf. Readers willing to trace these references find additional layers; those who don't still follow the narrative, but miss significant resonance.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Highway narrates with ostentatious directness — he announces chapters, summarizes blocks of time ('End of beginning'), and addresses the reader openly. But the novel's actual architecture is highly indirect: the distinction between Highway's real biography and his fabricated auction stories deliberately blurs; the book's own origin (commissioned by the Jumex art collection workers) is folded into the fiction; and the relationship between autobiography, storytelling, and lying is never resolved. Readers must continuously interrogate what they're being told.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- Teeth accumulate symbolic weight throughout: as relics, as markers of identity and class, as objects whose value is entirely constructed by narrative. The novel's central metaphor — that teeth can be attributed to Plato or Rousseau and thereby acquire cultural prestige — is a sustained allegory for how all cultural value is assigned rather than inherent. The auction house, the juice factory, the church, and the junkyard form a symbolic geography of Mexican capitalism and art patronage that runs beneath the picaresque comedy.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- The entire novel is constructed on ironic distance. Highway is a profoundly unreliable narrator who presents his grandiose self-image with straight-faced sincerity, and Luiselli's comedy depends on the gap between his claims and the reader's assessment of them. The philosophical epigraphs (Frege on reference, Mill on proper names) ironize the auction speeches; the cameos by real Mexican literary figures within the fiction undercut any stable border between reality and fabrication. Highway's confidence in his own methods is the source of nearly all the novel's humor.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The novel follows a loose narrative arc to a conclusion — the auction of Highway's teeth, the encounter with his estranged son Siddhartha, a theft, a recovery, a kind of reconciliation — but these events are presented with the same breezy summarizing tone as everything else, and the emotional weight is deliberately underplayed. The ending resolves plot without resolving the larger philosophical questions the novel raises, and several threads (the son, the relationship with the Jumex factory world) are tied up with deliberate casualness.
- Structural complexity: 72 out of 100
- The novel is organized in named 'Books' (The Story, The Hyperbolics, The Parabolics, The Circulars, The Allegorics, The Elliptics, The Chronologics) that map onto rhetorical figures. This structure is both satirical — mimicking the pomposity of classical rhetoric — and genuinely operative, as each section enacts its named trope. Within sections, vignettes, auction catalog entries, interpolated biographies, and philosophical epigraphs interrupt linear narration. The novel also embedded within its fiction the circumstances of its own composition: Luiselli wrote it for workers at the Jumex juice factory in Mexico City.
How The Story of My Teeth is regarded
The Story of My Teeth holds a literary regard score of 53 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.