Book review: The Gringo Champion, by Aura Xilonen

SOME novelists expect their readers to learn a new language. Clockwork Orange is challenging, and so, more recently, is Trainspotting. The Gringo Champion is equally demanding.

‘Yes, they’ve left me stratospherically muddled: my headlights are burned out, racooned, straticated like a panda. Black and blue. Turkeyfied. Back in my hometown they say I’ve got peeperitis — like the green-eyed monster. I can barely see where my peepers are reaching out their claws to touch things. My ears are asymmetrically buzzing, endecibelled by my ass-whuppative encounter with the addos.’

The novel is skilfully translated from Spanish by Andrea Rosenburg. The words that she and young Mexican author, Aura Xilonen, pour out of the mouth of the narrator, Liborio, are an energetic torrent! Reading it is exhausting but addictive. The words are versions of actual words, and in reading them the brain is engaged in an interpretative workout.