The Gringo Champion by Aura Xilonen

I shrug my shoulders again and feel like gunning away right there, awash in the many gallons of ink it must have taken the printers to splatter all those books with letters. But it's not like I'm scared of his anger. In the brawl outside, my pulse had been cataleptic, mummified. Serene. I could have passed a camel through the eye of a needle while I was pulping those scruffs. No, it's the chickadees, especially the beautiful ones, the flirtatious ones, that give me the shakes; I feel things leap in my belly just imagining I'm near one of them; I think I shouldn't even be breathing the same air they breathe; my marrow sizzles if I just brush their skin with my eyes, I can handle punch-ups, no problem. With those curves, though, I spin out and plunge into my deepest voids or whatever--but when the chickadee headed out of the bookstore I felt desolate, upside down, and all saggy-like.

Liborio works at a bookstore in a large, unnamed city somewhere on the northern side of the U.S.-Mexico border. His foul-mouthed boss lets him sleep in a small loft above the books, but when the store is broken into and vandalized, Liborio has to scram in case the cops come by and discover he's in the country illegally. Basically homeless, Liborio finds many people coming to his aid: a prurient woman reporter with cancer, the proprietor of a children's shelter, but most importantly, Aireen, the "chickadee" who lives across the street and with whom Liborio has fallen deeply in love. Being cast out brings challenges, but it ends up giving Liborio a new path in life, first with Aireen, and then as an amateur boxer: Liborio, we discover, has a punch that can take down even the biggest opponent.

I discovered while reading The Gringo Champion that Mexican-German writer Aura Xilonen was just 19 years old when she wrote it, and something about that makes sense; it has the air of a book written by an especially talented teenager. The story, such as it is, doesn't quite work; although the jacket compares it to The Adventures of Augie March, there's little of Augie's sense of being propelled forward into the wider world. Instead, Liborio kind of circles around the corner where Aireen lives, and where the bookstore was, spinning in circles, and the book sort of spins in circles, too. The latter of the book, set in the children's shelter, is a little treacly. (Liborio's greatest cheerleader is a young girl in a wheelchair; together they build the shelter a library.) And the way that Aireen appears in Liborio's life, cheerful and deeply interested, with only brief gestures toward conflict, reflects a teenager's hopeful attitude toward romance.

Despite all that, I couldn't put the book down, because I was captivated by the language. Liborio is an autodidact who learns everything he knows from the books in the bookstore; he's intelligent and articulate, and his eloquence overflows the vocabulary set out for him. Things are "poltergeistal," "polypathetic," "alphabeticated," "spangalanged." The success of it belongs, surely, as much to the translator, Andrea Rosenberg, as to Xilonen herself. And I was most struck by the way that Liborio describes the tribulation of crossing the Rio Grande into the United States; interspersed with the boxing and the chickadee-wooing is a harrowing story of braving the sun and the heat, and of narrowly escaping the bullets of the Border Patrol. Liborio is such a vivid, engaging presence; it can be easy to forget just how hard some people work to keep him from being here.