Los culpables
Juan Villoro

SHORT STORIES | 2008 | 168 pages

Los culpables offers a brilliant reflection on the possibilities of the spoken word. The six stories and the novella that make up this volume by Juan Villoro have been written in the first person. Through them, the writer does not seek to be a stenographer of real speech, but rather to explore the way in which someone could speak during a critical and revealing moment.

A mariachi fed up with his folkloric success, a soccer player on the verge of retirement, an executive who misses too many flights, a scriptwriter who edits with scissors, a window cleaner suspended from scaffolding, a traveler who adopts an iguana, and a host convinced that Mexicans only kill their friends tell the things they do not want to tell. None of them are professional writers; if any of them wanted to be, they’ve failed. Why do they vent in this book? To evade an uncomfortable responsibility. Curiously, they achieve the opposite.

Religious confessions seek to discharge guilt through revelations. With rare mastery, Villoro achieves the opposite procedure: his characters incriminate themselves for what they say to excuse themselves, they set themselves up for judgment.

A unique case of literature, Los culpables offers stories that seem to emerge by chance or by the very force of language, to find tales outside the will of their narrators.

“The cornered man becomes eloquent,” wrote George Steiner. With high doses of humor, verbal precision, and dramatic tension, Juan Villoro records the exceptional eloquence of those who, to free themselves from the truth that besieges them, become guilty of literature.

RIGHTS: spanish (world) ANAGRAMA | spanish (mexico) ALMADÍA | english (usa) GEORGE BRAZILLER | italian CUEC

BY JUAN VILLORO:

No soy un robot
NONFICTION, 2024
La figura del mundo
FICTION, 2023
La tierra de la gran promesa
FICTION, 2021
El vértigo horizontal
FICTION, 2019
Llamadas de Amsterdam
FICTION, 2018
¿Hay vida en la tierra?
FICTION, 2014
Balón dividido
NONFICTION, 2014
Conferencia sobre la lluvia
THEATER, 2014
Arrecife
FICTION, 2012
El libro salvaje
CHILDREN’S, 2008
Los culpables
SHORT STORIES, 2008
Dios es redondo
NONFICTION, 2006
El testigo
FICTION, 2004
El disparo de Argón
FICTION, 1991