I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me

'We laugh (a lot!), although perhaps we shouldnt, as each laugh carries the implicit admission that some of what we are laughing at is actually true. Nadal Suau, El Cultural, El Mundo'With a torrential, expressive rhythm, a continuous series of happy absurdities, the nostalgic sensibility of the immigrant and a devastating humour, Juan Pablo Villalobos has written a magnificent novel that provokes reflection on multicultural values and the meaning and importance of tolerance. Jesús Ferre, La Razón'A sarcastic, entertaining and acidic story. A book that debunks literature, proposing the idea that a primary function of the novel is hedonistic. But, despite all its outrageous goings-on, this book becomes an artefact against reality, a satire against cliché, a literary artefact against meaninglessness and a defence of the vital importance of humour J.L Martín Nogales, Diario de Navarra'Hilariously cutting, furnished with highly stylized coarse humour, Juan Pablo Villalobos novels do not follow any rules, other than the logic of the absurd . . . The authors intelligence steers us through the jokes and disasters, and especially the nonsense, which he redeems with a leavening sarcasm that turns reading the book into a highly valuable act of literary renewal. Francisco Solano, El País'I Dont Expect Anyone to Believe Me is, among many other things, a playful and perverse game with the tradition of the Latin American perspective on Barcelona. And yet, the humour Villalobos employs is like that found in some of the most innovative recent Catalan literature. He is, clearly, a Barcelonan. El Cultural'By means of parody and the absurd, Villalobos latest novel I Dont Expect Anyone to Believe Me plunges the reader into a merry game of confusion. The various narrators present us with a world in which the lives of the characters become so tangled up that fiction and reality fuse into one, creating a work brimming with irony, nonsense and a humour so sharp it allows the reader to glimpse, just behind it, a reality that is hilarious in itself. Zyanya Dóniz, Criticismo'His novels are hilarious because they are about serious subjects. He expresses himself with the lucidity of someone who knows we are being cheated. Villalobos - a bit like a Spanishlanguage Kurt Vonnegut - manages to escape the clichés that his country endures. Miqui Otero, El Confidencial