What's it really like to grow up the child of a Mexican drug lord? Heck if I know, but Villalobos here creates a somewhat surreal portrait of it through the voice of young Tochtli in this bite-sized novella. The things we learn about are:

*)The isolation. "There aren't really that many people who say I'm precocious. The problem is I don't know that many people. I know maybe thirteen or fourteen people, and four of them say I'm precocious."

*)The unusual parent-child conversations. "I know all this from a game Yolcaut and I play. It's a question-and-answer game. One person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell. 'One bullet in the heart.' 'Corpse.' 'Thirty bullets in the little toenail of the left foot.' 'Alive.' 'Three bullets in the pancreas.' 'Too early to tell.'"

*)Politics. "The Governor is a man who thinks he governs the people who live in a state. Yolcaut says the Governor doesn't govern anyone, not even his fucking mother. In any case the Governor is a nice man, although he has a tuft of white hair in the middle of his head that he doesn't shave off. I had fun listening to Yolcaut and the Governor talking. But the Governor didn't. His face was all red, as if it were going to explode, because I was eating some quesadillas while they had green pozole and talked about their cocaine business."

*)Suspicion. "Yolcaut watched the news with me and when it was over he said some enigmatic things to me. First he said: 'Ah, they suicided her.' And then, when he'd stopped laughing: 'Think the worst and you'll be right.'

*)Expensive trips. "A Monrovian guide is good for three things: so you don't get lost in Monrovia, so you don't get killed in Monrovia, and for finding Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. That's why he's charging us a lot of money, millions of dollars I think. Because it turns out that finding Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses isn't easy, even in Liberia."

( )

Down the Rabbit Hole is narrated by Tochtli, the child of a Mexican drug lord who lives in a palace shut off from the outside world and surrounded by bodyguards. Tochtli is a precocious child who is fascinated with hats, samurai and the Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. He describes his life and observations in a disarming way that almost screens out the violence and paranoia that lurks close by.

Tochtli is not naive about his world, but he does represent it through his own particular lens of childish priorities. So the book merely alludes to the adult goings-on that serve to drive the plot, because Tochtli himself does not fully appreciate them. This childish narrative leads to a couple of real laugh-out-loud moments.

Tochtli is an appealing character in a situation that, while it is only hinted at, is really quite horrific on reflection. Villalobos has delivered a brilliantly subtle novel that conceals some disturbing elements behind the facade of a child talking about his own obsessions. ( )

A Tochtli le gustan los sombreros, los diccionarios, los samuráis, las guillotinas y los franceses. Pero Tochtli es un niño y ahora lo que quiere es un nuevo animal para su zoológico privado: un hipopótamo enano de Liberia. Su padre, Yolcaut, un narcotraficante en la cúspide del poder, está dispuesto a cumplir todos sus caprichos. No importa que se trate de un animal exótico en peligro de extinción. Porque Yolcaut siempre puede. Tochtli vive en un palacio. Una madriguera recubierta de oro en la que convive con trece o quizá catorce personas: matones, meretrices, dealers, sirvientes y algún político corrupto. Y además está Mazatzin, su profesor particular, para quien el mundo es un lugar lleno de injusticias donde los imperialistas tienen la culpa de todo.

I was reading an article about the translation of foreign language book into English and who were the best translators. This book was mentioned as Rosalind Harvey translation was considered to be one of the best.

The book is really a novella and it is an interesting look into the literature of South America though the author is Mexican the this story take place In Honduras. It is a tale of a boy obsessions for hats, samurai, guillotines, dictionaries and pygmy hippopotamus. His father, who is a drug dealer, both ignores him and loves him. A strange family dynamic is going on in this book. I enjoyed it greatly. ( )

short and satisfying. ( )