Down the Rabbit Hole

Down the Rabbit Hole, by Juan Pablo Villalobos, translated by Rosalind Harvey

Down the Rabbit Hole is fascinating and vivid.

The prose captures the speech and mind of a child, which is incredibly difficult to do well. Both Villalobos and the translator, Rosalind Harvey, who also translated Villalobos' 2014 novel I'LL SELL YOU A DOG, deserve credit for that.

I'm not generally a huge fan of stories about anti-heroic gangsters, but the amoral feralness of Tochtli's voice overcame a lot of that hesitation. And the dramatic, unique details--Liberian pygmy hippopotamus poaching! It's a testament to the power of specific detail to tell a universal story.