‘An Elegant Surpassing of the Truth’: Interrogating Authenticity, Authorship and the Production of Value in The Story of My Teeth

Katie

article will therefore analyse how Luiselli both highlights and challenges the values attributed to authors' names. In addition, it will demonstrate how Luiselli interrogates notions of authorship in the testimonio, a genre which derives its value primarily from its supposed authenticity. Mill, Gottlob Frege, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, David Kaplan and Bertrand Russell. It is significant that this revision followed Luiselli's translation work with refugee children, whose names held no value in the immigration system and who were dehumanised through the label of 'illegal immigrants '. 4 This article therefore proposes a study of both the Spanish and the English version, with attention to what has been, in Highway's words, 'better illuminated' in the translation (Luiselli 2015a: 33): the ways in which stories can be used to market objects, places and people; the economic value attached to certain artists' names; and the ways in which 'authentic' voices are incorporated into literature through the genre of testimonio, and how these can be used to add value to a narrative, The demand for authenticity in contemporary literary markets extends to writers themselves, who are marketed as representative of a distinct national identity. Valeria Luiselli has been touted as one of the leading contemporary Mexican authors. In 2015, for example, she was sent to the London Book Fair as a representative of Mexico, during the Mexico market-focus as part of the year of British-Mexican collaboration, while La historia de mis dientes was published by Sexto Piso in Mexico in 2013 thanks to government sponsorship from the Ministry for Culture and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. 5 Nonetheless, Luiselli is wary of overarching narratives of national identity. In an article against tendencies in new criticism in Mexico (Luiselli 2015b), she condemns the obsession with 'the national' and discourses of identity, which reduce writers to a handful of values that have little to do with literary qualities.
Consequently, her work avoids totalizing narratives of identity. What we find in her writing, in Teresa Gónzalez Arce's (2016: 257) terms, 'no son identidades acabadas y coherentes sino construcciones fragmentarias e incompletas' ['are not complete and coherent identities but fragmentary and incomplete constructions'].
Luiselli was born in Mexico but has lived a transnational life. At two years old, she moved to the United States, and has since lived in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa and India. She has subsequently moved back to the United States, where she completed a PhD at Columbia University. This transnational life has shaped her writing practice. Luiselli explains that as a child she felt her 'language was imperfect, full of holes and gaps' (Kabat 2014: 104), and began collecting words in books to control her self-consciousness. As a teenager, in India, she read Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, as well as classic Spanish authors such as Lope de Vega, and in this way 'began to understand and feel [her]self to be part of a linguistic and literary tradition or community' (Neyra 2015). This familiarity with the Spanish language literary tradition, as well as the urge to collect, is highly visible in the abundance of authors who make an appearance in The Story of my Teeth. Equally, Luiselli states that she is inspired by the English essay form in its 'circling, entering, and leaving topics with fluency and humour' (Neyra 2015), evidenced in the structure of this novel.
The Story of my Teeth is a genre-defying book. Reviewers and scholars have referred to it variously as a novel, an essay, autofiction and biofiction, or a mixture of them all. It is the story of Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, known as 'Carretera' in the Spanish, or 'Highway' in the English. In the first chapter, significantly called 'The Story (Beginning, Middle, and End)', Highway introduces himself, explains how he worked at the Jumex juice factory before becoming an auctioneer, and recounts his quest to replace his malformed teeth. This seemingly straightforward narrative is then progressively complicated by a series of chapters titled 'The Hyperbolics', 'The Parabolics', 'The Circulars', 'The Allegorics', and 'The Elliptics', in which we see Highway purport to sell the teeth of famous essayists throughout history, and later auction a collection of objects stolen from the Jumex Gallery through tangentially related stories. Throughout the novel, we see everyday charactersfrom the newspaper seller to the factory workergiven the names of real-life writers, including Rubén Darío, Julio Cortázar, Yuri Herrera and even Valeria Luiselli. This plot allows Luiselli to introduce interconnected questions about constructions of authenticity, the power of narrative to create value, and the special position afforded to writers. In addition, in chapter 4, 'The Circulars', we meet Voragine, a struggling writer who becomes Highway's apprentice. As I will discuss later in this article, Voragine is revealed in 'The Elliptics' to have transcribed Highway's narrative, in a parody of the testimonio.
The book began life when Magalí Arriola and Juan Gaitán, curators of the exhibition 'El cazador y la fábrica' [The Hunter and the Factory] at the Jumex Gallery, commissioned a piece by Luiselli for the exhibition catalogue. The gallery houses the largest private collection of contemporary art in Latin America and is funded by the profits of the Jumex juice factory.
As Emilio Sauri (2019: 281-282) explores, the gallery tends to distance itself from the factory that funds it as this link to commerce is seen to be 'bad taste'. Arriola and Gaitán put together the exhibition in response to questions about urban isolation and the separation of the gallery from its surrounding area (Gil 2014). However, they gave few clues to understanding the collected artworks. Liz Munsell (2013) describes: Along the margins of the exhibition, viewers themselves lurch around as they search for the scarcely visible labels identifying the artworks. Intentional or not, this mindful pursuit instils a hope for new modes of spectatorship, turning the art voyeur into a cognizant agent.
Meaning making therefore became a collaboration between the artists, the curators, and the viewers, who had to tell themselves stories about what they saw, which is reflected in the stories Highway invents for each of the pieces in the exhibition within the novel. Luiselli agreed to write a piece for the exhibition on the condition that the workers of the juice factory could be involved in its creation. She insists, 'Los obreros fueron fundamentales: escribí la primera versión con ellos, no sólo para ellos' (Gil 2014) ['The workers were fundamental: I wrote the first version with them, not just for them']. As she explains in different ways in the afterwords to both the Spanish and English versions of the book, this was both a local and a transnational process; local in that a group of workers would meet regularly in the factory to read chapters sent to them by Luiselli, discuss them and give feedback based on their own experiences, but transnational because Luiselli was in New York at the time and would listen to the discussions as audio files emailed to her. Despite this insistence on the involvement of the workers, however, Eugenio di Stefano (2017) affirms that, in contrast to examples of Mexican proletarian writing from the 1930s, the novel is not pitched at workers beyond those directly involved in the writing process. He adds that 'the emphasis on literary language, and even literary referents, work against not only an identification with workers of proletarian literature but also the immediacy between the subaltern and reader that marks the testimonio' (Di Stefano, 2017: 149). Luiselli incorporates aspects of the lives of workers in this experimental novel not as a document of lived experience, but to raise questions about what we take to be an 'authentic' representation and the values attached to this.
Although not a straightforward realist portrayal of the workers, the novel is in part a celebration of the Jumex workers and their local area, Ecatepec de Morelos, on the outskirts of Mexico City. Because of his accent and mannerisms, in the Spanish version, Carretera has been described as a caricature of the 'chilango' (Castro 2017: 2), a resident of the Mexican capital.
Despite his many flaws, readers are encouraged to view this picaresque character with affection. Similarly, Luiselli presents a 'loving' portrait of Ecatepec (Betancourt 2015). Search for Ecatepec online and you will find countless articles about how dangerous the city is, having been reported as one of the five cities in Mexico with the most murder investigations every year since December 2012, primarily a result of drug crimes. 6 This side of the city, however, is absent from The Story of my Teeth. Luiselli (2015b) is critical of the obsession with the violent and the marginaldrug-trafficking, prostitution, and murderin contemporary Mexican fiction, arguing that critics do not lead people to question or reflect on these issues, but rather celebrate them. By contrast, Luiselli gives us factory workers, newspaper sellers, and scrapyard owners, characters who are not usually present in international imaginaries of Mexico. There is an additional irony in the location of Highway's house, on Calle Disneylandia, which further emphasises the distance between the international tourist destination that sells a fantasy and Highway's forgotten neighbourhood. Ecatepec is far from the tourist sites of Mexico City, yet Highway insists to his protégé, Voragine, that tourists will come if he tells stories about the neighbourhood: 'As soon as you've got those, there'll be people flocking to them. Places and things are made up of stories' (Luiselli 2015a: 101). Like many aspects of the book, this phrase from Highway simultaneously asserts that the everyday people and places of Epatepec are worthy of as much attention as any famous person or landmark and underlines how contact with locals has been commodified for tourists seeking a more 'authentic' experience. The guided tour of Ecatepec is brought to life through the inclusion of images from Google Maps and photographs of local buildings, including the exterior of the juice factory, in the final chapter of the Spanish, 'Paseo Circular' [Circular Route], and the penultimate chapter of the English, 'The Elliptics'. However, Luiselli warns attentive readers, in the Spanish version, that these photographs may not be all they seem, by crediting most of them to W.G. Sebald, 7 the German writer famous for the mix of fact, recollection and fiction in his works and his use of photographs not to illustrate, but to problematize, his narratives. Sebald famously stated in a 1993 interview that 'People let themselves be convinced by a photograph' (Pate 2007: 106). The inclusion of the photographs in the novel can then be seen as another aspect of the novel through which Luiselli both offers authenticity (in this case a view of a real place distinct from both the touristic image of Mexico and the one common to the narconovela) and demonstrates how authenticity can be staged.

Producing value through stories and names
The Story of my Teeth revolves around Highway's ability to sell worthless objects, including his old rotten teeth, based on the stories he tells about them. This aspect of the book has been celebrated in English-language reviews. Manuel Betancourt (2015), for example, highlights that from the opening lines readers are 'alerted that the seemingly simple story of Highway's choppers […] will be interwoven with a larger meditation on the arbitrary nature of language and the commodification of art'. The opening of La historia de mis dientes was more enigmatic, introducing the concept of radical recycling: 'Está es la historia de mis dientes. Es mi carta familiar a la posteridad, mi ensayo sobre los coleccionables y el reciclaje radical' [This is the story of my teeth. It is my letter to posterity, my essay on collectibles and radical recycling] (Luiselli 2013: 19). By contrast, the English version begins, 'This is the story of my teeth, and my treatise on collectibles and the variable value of objects' (Luiselli 2015a: 1). Although recycling can be interpreted as changing the value of an object, giving it a new worth in a different context, the English version leaves no doubt that the novel is in dialogue with the rules of the market economy. 8 Highway understands that authenticity sells, even when it is fabricated. When he holds an auction of his teeth to raise money for the local church, he invents origin stories for each one, imbuing them with a sense of place and time, despite having no documents of this provenance. In the English version, Highway explains that he will employ his own 'hyperbolic' auctioneering model: As the great Quintilian had once said, by means of my hyperbolics, I could restore an object's value through "an elegant surpassing of the truth". This meant that the stories I would tell about the lots would all be based on facts that were, occasionally, exaggerated or, to put it another way, better illuminated. (Luiselli 2015a: 33) Readers can appreciate the comic irony here that Highway's 'exaggerations' are in fact outright lies. Whereas the provenance of these teethpurportedly belonging to Petrarch, Rousseau and Virginia Wolf, among othersis left ambiguous in the Spanish version, in the English it is clearly stated that these are the teeth removed from his own mouth (34). This reinforces the message that the only value in these teeth derives from the story Highway is able to spin about them. As Marco Ramírez Rojas (2018) maintains, it is really Highway's words that are for sale.
Having linked Highway to the Jumex factory and gallery earlier in the book, Luiselli implies that the methods of cheeky auctioneer -inspired in part by Luiselli's uncle who worked in the giant Central de Abastos market in Mexico City (englishpen1921 2015)are not that different from those of international art dealers, only Highway is more honest about it.
While Mexican readers are likely to be aware of the two arms of Jumex, international readers may not be. Consequently, in the English version of the novel, when telling the story of his job as a factory watchman, Highway explains: The factory produced juices. And the juices, in turn, produced art. That is to say, the juice sales funded the largest art collection in the continent. It was a good job to have since, although I was only in charge of guarding the factory entrance and was never allowed into the gallery where the art was shown, I was in a sense the gatekeeper of a collection of objects of real beauty and truth. (Luiselli 2015a: 6-7) This speech makes a powerful statement about the inequality apparent at the Jumex site. As Highway himself is directly exploited by the art community in the English version of the novel. Whereas Highway's son is a private security guard at the Jumex Gallery in the Spanish (Luiselli, 2013: 48), in the English he 'works as an art curator' (Luiselli 2015a: 38).
Thus, when he tricks Highway into bequeathing him all his possessions, this becomes an appropriation by the art gallery. Highway's teeth then become one of the exhibits, 'arranged in a little pile, lit vertically from above, and placed on a white wooden pedestal' (115). His subsequent theft of objects from the gallery is therefore a justifiable retribution. It is this section of the novel where the most significant changes between the Spanish and English versions, in terms of questions about the values of art, can be seen. This part of the story had been part of a different chapter in the Spanish, narrated by Carretera's mentee. In the English, Highway gets to tell the story himself, albeit through Voragine's mediation, emphasizing the importance of these events to Highway's own understanding of his life. As revenge for being kidnapped, robbed and humiliated by his son, Highway goes to 'pick up and recycle some objects' (114) from the gallery, which he then plans to auction through a series of 'Allegorics of Ecatepec'.
Highway's plan is to 'recycle our new collected objects by telling stories that used collected names of my friends and acquaintances from the neighbourhood' (115), that is, to use the local to bring meaning to objects which are otherwise incomprehensible. Through placing each stolen object within a story of local people, Highway affirms that these objects belong to the local community, whose labour made their purchase possible. In the English, unlike in the Spanish, the contents of the 'The Hunter and the Factory' exhibition are mentioned, earlier in the story, as Highway wanders about the gallery where he has been left by his son. He notices: Placed in odd spots and in corners were a series of objects: a billboard featuring a horse inside a hotel room, a sleeping stuffed dog, a couple of plush rat and mouse costumes, a hairy prosthetic leg, a tiny baobab tree, a pile of whistles, a music score on a tripod, and a fake window consisting solely of light thrown onto the wall by halogen spotlights. (75) This encourages readers to see each of the art-works to be sold in the 'Allegorics of Ecatepec' auction as the objects referred to previously. Moreover, whereas the Spanish simply gives the stories inspired by the objects, the English gives the artists' names, slightly altered: Doug

Luiselli insists that the inclusion of authors' names in
Teeth is not a mere homage (Gil 2014).
Instead, critics have read this aspect of the book as Luiselli constructing a literary territory in which to place herself (Pape 2015: 193) or a map or personal encyclopaedia of her intellectual interests (Ramírez Rojas 2018: 345). While these are valid readings, I contend that through this innovative use of writers' names Luiselli also interrogates the values attributed to the name of an author or artist, particularly the idea that an artist is somehow worth more than other people are. Ironically, this point was reinforced by critic Roberto Pliego's review (2014), which objected to the use of writers' names, suggesting writers are somehow sacred. 9 This question is not just hypothetical for Luiselli. In Tell Me How it Ends (2017), she struggles with the fact that, because they are in the United States as professional writers, her and her husband, Álvaro Enrigue, receive better treatment and face an easier immigration process than the children for whom she interprets. In this respect, the addition of epigraphs from semioticians about proper names in the English version is particularly noteworthy. These include David Kaplan's claim that 'Names are a special kind of word, so special that some have thought them not to be part of language at all' (111) and Bertrand Russell's logical deduction that '"The author of Waverly" means nothing' (135). Both epigraphs urge readers to examine how and why we react to the use of authors' names in the text.

Exposing the limits of authenticity and authorship in testimonio and translations
Luiselli describes tape recording discussions and capturing the informal language of the workers, insisting that 'many of the stories told in this book come from workers' personal accounts' (2015a: 181). Although we can question how much of the book comes from the workers, and the extent to which they benefitted from the success of the novel, incorporating their input into a novel that also refers to canonical works of literature undermines distinctions between the different sources, asserting that one is no more valuable than the other. In this way, Luiselli demonstrates what Joanna Bartow (2005: 13) calls 'the political power and subversive potential of ceding published space to the "authentic" voices of marginalized groups'. However, this is not a straightforward process in Teeth.
By labelling the chapters with Highway's auctioning techniques, according to Marco Ramírez Rojas (2018: 338), Luiselli acknowledges a 'voluntad performativa de poner esta historia "a la venta"' [performative will to put this story up for sale]. As such, we can ask whether Luiselli is doing what Highway does, giving her productthat is, her novelvalue by imbuing it with authenticity. I suggest that the insistence on the Jumex factory workers as the source of this narrative is a form of 'staged marginality', in Graham Huggan's (2001) terms.
That is not to suggest that the workers were not important in the creation of this story, but that this emphasis on the authentic roots of the novel is a selling point for the book. 10 It displays 'both resistance and adherence to the mechanisms of a global market' (Segnini 2017: 100), 11 in that it simultaneously gives space to voices that are rarely published and feeds the market for authenticity in literature. Moreover, I argue that Luiselli recognises this duality by parodying the testimonio in the form and content of the novel.
The Latin American testimonio genre reached its apogee in the 1980s and 1990s, with works such as Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia [I, Rigoberta Menchú] (1983), the account of a Guatemalan activist, transcribed by anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos.
The novela testimonial [testimonial novel] has enjoyed enormous commercial success, and has become one of the genres most associated with Latin American writing, as well as the subject of intense academic debate. 12 Although Teeth contains too much invention to be called a novela testimonial, it clearly engages with many of the questions arising from the discussions about the genre that have taken place in the last three decades, in particular how the value of testimonio derives from its claims to authenticity.
Told in the first-person, the opening chapter, significantly called 'The Story (Beginning, Middle, and End)' purports to offer the truth of a life, which is then altered or undermined by the subsequent chapters. The first-person voice lends authority to the narrative, aiming to persuade readers that this is a genuine insight into marginality or exploitation (in this case, the inequality inherent in the Jumex organisation) from an eyewitness. John Beverley (2008: 572) contends that the first-person narrator in testimonial writing is 'an "I" that demands to be recognised', displaying 'a desire not to be silenced or defeated'. Despite repeatedly claiming to be a modest man, Highway is a character who demands recognition, beginning his story with an account of his talents, which include counting to eight in Japanese, imitating Janis Joplin, and balancing an egg on its head like Columbus could, equating himself with one of the most significant figures in Latin American history through a trivial activity (Luiselli 2015a: 1).
Notably, however, Highway does not claim recognition for himself as a representative of the marginalised and exploited. He does not recognise himself as such, at least not overtly, presenting himself instead as a successful auctioneer. It is left to readers to infer his exploitation from his narrative, especially from his comments about the juice factory, and the abuse he suffers at the hands of his son, as an embodiment the gallery. Elzbieta Sklodowska (1982: 379) reminds us that a testimonial narrative is not a direct account of a lived experience, but distorted by memory and intention. Highway's bravado alerts readers from the start to take his account of his life with a large pinch of salt. This becomes increasingly clear as we learn about how he fabricates stories to add value to the objects he auctions, until finally the entire artifice is revealed when Highway's protégé, Voragine, takes over the narration at the end of the story and gives his own, contrasting, account of Highway's unhappy life of poverty and seclusion. By the end of the novel, we learn that the preceding chapters are the story Highway has told to Voragine, who takes the role of the testimonial transcriber within the text. In this way, the novel is an example of fiction that 'exaggerates the tensions present in the transcriber-informant relationship to such an extent that these texts serve as commentaries on testimonial paradoxes glossed over in the past' (Bartow 2005: 26). It is worth noting that in the Spanish, Carratera's protégé is called Beto Bálser, after the Swiss Modernist writer Robert Walser, who made his living in many menial assistant jobs. In the English, Voragine takes his name from the medieval chronicler, otherwise known as Jacopo de Fazio, whose most famous work was the compilation of the Legenda Aurea, which recounted the legendary lives of major saints. This change in name both reflects the greater emphasis on the character's role in crafting the story of Highway's life that reaches audiences and encourages readers to draw comparisons between Highway and these saints considered worthy of memorialisation. When Highway first meets Voragine, the young man states, 'I am a writer and a church tour guide in the city. I live by the latter and die by the former' (Luiselli 2015a: 94). Voragine reveals that writing is a painful struggle for him, that he is unable to write because he is 'terrified of irrelevance' (95). This implies that by helping Highway to share his story, Voragine also benefits, feeling like he is writing something worthwhile and more likely to appeal to readers. This exemplifies Joanna Bartow's (2005: 25) claim that a transcriber of testimonio identifying with an informant is a 'gesture of self-legitimation' producing a 'vicarious identity'. Nonetheless, in Teeth, Highway reclaims his role as author. When Highway commissions Voragine to write his 'dental autobiography', Voragine replies, 'It would be your biography not your autobiography', and Highway counters, 'It is my autobiography […] because it is my story, and I will tell it, and you just transcribe' (101-103).
In this way, the novel questions the limits of authorship, further problematizing the value ascribed to the figure of the author.
Teeth also explores questions about the veracity of testimonio through Voragine. He transcribes these stories, knowing that they are lies, or 'surpassing the truth' (137), but excuses this because he comes to realise that exaggeration is a fundamental part of Highway's character.
Furthermore, the novel demonstrates how the transcriber creates a 'reality effect' by 'edit [ing] and mak[ing] a story out of the narrator's discourse' (Beverley 2005: 574). Voragine recounts that he suggested a structure to Highway, 'beginning, middle, end' (114). This explains not only the title of the first chapter, but also Highway's habit of signposting, repeating phrases such as 'End of anecdote'. Such explicit evidence of the transcriber's involvement in shaping the story urges readers to look for similar, though less obvious, techniques in testimonial writing. As the part of the novel supposedly narrated by Highway reaches its end, there is a short dialogue between Highway and Voragine (129), revealing that what has been presented as a monologue has in fact been shaped from a dialogue: 'And I guess that we can now say that I lived happily thereafter, right Voragine?' 'I guess so, Highway'.
'So write that down and let's go out to meet some ladies'. (129) This exchange undermines the solemnity of the testimonio, as Highway is less interested in sharing his story than going out. Highway's use of the trope of the happy ending more common to a fairy tale or romance, and Voragine's acceptance of this trope, counters the false erasure of the transcriber in most testimonial narratives, again encouraging readers to look for the transcriber and the narrative conventions behind the narrative voice in other texts. When writing the novel, Luiselli similarly revealed herself at the end of the process of recording the workers, sending them a recording of herself. She states, 'I had been writing under the pseudonym of Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez and I thought it was important to close the circle of intimacy we had created by letting them hear my real voice' (Luiselli 2015a: 181). This comment indicates Luiselli's awareness of the power imbalances inherent in the informant/transcriber relationship.
As well as making visible the role of the transcriber in a testimonio, The Story of my Teeth also challenges the traditional invisibility of the translator. Lawrence Venuti (1995: 317) famously argued against this invisibility, stressing that translators must 'work to revise the individualistic concept of authorship […] by developing innovative translation practices in which their work becomes visible to readers'. Christina MacSweeney's translation does just this, adding a new chapter called 'The Chronologics', which takes the form of a timeline detailing both events from Highway's life story and an eclectic collection of trivia about the writers whose names appear in the novel. MacSweeney (2016) explains that she did not want 'dry as dust translator's notes', so instead set out to provide information which could help orient Anglophone readers in a creative way. 'The Chronologics' is the most visible change to the book and the main one picked up on by English language critics, who have praised Luiselli for being 'generous' enough to share authorship with MacSweeney (Krusoe 2015), ironically reaffirming the exaltation of the author that the novel contests through its use of names and parody of the testimonio. MacSweeney (2016) noted that the chapter would be translated and included in the second Spanish addition, as well as being incorporated into translations of the book into various other languages. This case challenges set ideas about the source text as the original, and the translation as a subsidiary or inferior text, asserting that each version is instead a step in a continuing, collaborative process of creation. The fact that the English version is a rewriting of the Spanish, which significantly alters the meaning and reception of the text, encourages us to question the validity of terms like original or fidelity. As Rebecca Walkowitz (2015: 45) argues, 'Instead of asking about fidelity, whether the subsequent editions match the original, one might ask about innovation and about the various institutional and aesthetic frameworks that shape the work's ongoing production'. In comparing the two texts, Jorge Téllez (2017) argues that 'The Chronologics' brings order, showing readers how the many names in the story are part of something bigger: 'Se pasa entonces de lo arbitrario o aleatorio como defecto a la ilusión de arbitrariedad como efecto' ['In this way it moves from the arbitrary or random as a defect to the illusion of arbitrariness as an effect']. I would dispute the idea that the names were simply random in the Spanish and that not providing further information on the people behind the names was a defect. As Sauri (2019: 287)  languages, responding to new contexts. One the one hand, this undermines the value placed on the author as the sole creator of an original work, mirroring the questioning of the value ascribed to authors' names in the novel. On the other hand, the blurring of borders between the workers' contributions and Luiselli's own makes explicit the many tensions inherent in the informant/transcriber relationship within the testimonio genre and the marketization of the 'authentic' narrative. This ambivalence is the defining characteristic of The Story of my Teeth, a novel that combines the local (the people, places and everyday stories of Ecatepec) and the international (canonical writers and global art markets), in defiance of what Luiselli (2015b) calls 'la falsedad de la tentadora dicotomía entre lo cosmopolita y lo local' ['the false dichotomy between the cosmopolitan and the local']. It is a novel with multiple implied audiences, which overlap in part: the workers, who are in on the joke about Jumex; literary tourists seeking an 'authentic' experience in Ecatepec, whose ideas about authenticity will be challenged; and those with wide-ranging knowledge about canonical and contemporary Latin American literature and international art markets, who will be encouraged to reassess the values they attribute to artworks, artists and writers.