Teeth and Spies

By Giorgio Pressburger

Book Overview

This is the tragi-comic account of one man's life through the fate of his teeth; from the loss of his first milk tooth swallowed by his father in a prison camp, to the eventual fixture of a set of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1862072698
• ISBN13: 9781862072695
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Granta Books
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.6" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

A Raucous Romp Through The World of Teeth

I am in awe and envy of Pressburger's book. Structured geniusly, each chapter has to do with one or more of the narrator's teeth. How he lost these teeth, how he gained these teeth, the dentist that pulled these teeth, the lovers he had while losing these teeth. Yet this is book isn't remotely just about teeth. It essentially covers an enormous amount of the life span of our narrator---from when he lost his first set of teeth as a child, to the losing of his teeth late into his adulthood. The narrator is an Italian Jew, the son of a ritual butcher living in post-war Italy. He is an atheist and, like Woodie Allen, he has the tendency to wind up in bed with the most beautiful of gentile women. Perhaps this book can be seen as a more cheery version of Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, a book whose structure is also determined by science. Yet where Levi is severe, realistic and depressing, the narrator of Teeth and Spies is humorous, dramatic and touching in his own patheticness; in his constant dissatisfaction for everything that life has to give him.Then there's this whole bit about our narrator being a spy. We never know for sure whether or not he actually is a spy, or who he is even spying for.Then there's this great bet he has with one of his dentists, who is trying to convince him to convert to Christianity. The narrator and the dentist make a bet, the details of which state that depending on which one of the narrator's teeth falls out first, he will have to become a Christian. One of the thieves was saved and one of the thieves was damned.This is an immensely complicated, profound, systematically conceived novel which is sure to leave any reader wishing that he or she had been flossing not since last week's epiphany, but their whole life long.