Quesadillas: A Novel

It’s the  eighties in Lagos de Moreno — a town where there are more cows than people, and more priests than cows — and a poor family struggles to  overcome the bizarre dangers of living in Mexico. The father, a high school civics teacher, insists on practicing and teaching the art of the insult, while the mother prepares hundreds of quesadillas to serve to their numerous progeny: Aristotle, Orestes, Archilochus, Callimachus, Electra, Castor, and Pollux. Confined to their home, the family bears witness to the revolt against the Institutional Revolutionary Party and their umpteenth electoral fraud. This political upheaval is only the beginning of son Orestes’s adventures and his uproarious crusade against the boredom of rustic life and the tyranny of his older brother. 

Both profoundly moving and wildly funny, Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Quesadillas is a satiric masterpiece, chock-full of inseminated cows, Polish immigrants, religious pilgrims, alien spacecraft, psychedelic watermelons, and many, many “your mama” insults.