Quesadillas
by Juan Pablo Villalobos
(And Other Stories, £7.99)

THE THIRTEEN-year-old Mexican boy Orestes (Oreo) is trying to survive in a world that doesn’t quite make sense.

In Juan Pablo Villalobos's novel, it is a world of vast economic inequalities, growing social injustices, entrenched poverty, corruption and political mismanagement.

He lives in Lagos de Moreno, on top of the “Cerro de la Chingada” (“The hill in the middle of fucking nowhere”), where “there are more cows than people, more charro horsemen than horses, more priests than cows and the people like to believe in the existence of ghosts, miracles, spaceships, saints and so forth.”

Oreo’s family battle daily to get by in an uphill struggle against rocketing inflation, rationing, starvation and political instability. His mother constantly prepares hundreds of quesadillas — the typical Mexican dish of tortillas filled with cheese — to keep the family quiet and avert disaster.

But this is no typical family. Oreo's teacher father is an inveterate insulter who often lashes out against politicians on TV — “Fucking robbers! Corrupt bastards!” — and there are seven brothers all colourfully named after ancient Greeks and Romans.

Twins Castor and Pollux have suddenly disappeared and, according to tyrannical older brother Aristotle, they've been abducted by aliens.

Skilfully translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey, Quesadillas is a brilliant satire, a fierce and poignant tale of madness and absurdity in a country where the rich get richer and the poor even more poverty-stricken.

Oreo’s family witness a revolt against the Institutional Revolutionary Party, its numerous electoral frauds and the arrival of a rich family of Polish immigrants in the business of inseminating cows.

They'll later force them to leave their humble neighbourhood to build Olympic Heights, an exclusive condominium for the rich.

That is only the beginning of Oreo's misadventures and his unsuccessful search for a better life.

On the way, he encounters destitute pilgrims, miraculous virgins, psychedelic watermelons fertilised by human excrement, an incompetent policeman, dodgy politicians parading on TV and lots of cheesy quesadillas.  

Villalobos’s second novel, after his critically acclaimed debut Down the Rabbit Hole, proves that he is a force to be reckoned with.

His ferocious tone, comic grasp and radical vision distinguishes him as one of the best Latin American writers of his generation.

In Quesadillas, he's produced a witty, dark and provocative masterpiece.