Pola Oloixarac

From the critically acclaimed author of Savage Theories and Dark Constellations comes Pola Oloixarac’s Mona, where success as a "writer of color" proves to be a fresh hell for a young Latin American woman at a literary conference in Sweden. Mona, a Peruvian writer based in California, presents a tough and sardonic exterior. She likes drugs and cigarettes, and when she learns that she is something of an anthropological curiosity—a woman writer of color treasured at her university for the flourish of rarefied diversity she brings—she pokes fun at American academic culture and its fixation on identity. When she is nominated for “the most important literary award in Europe,” Mona sees a chance to escape her downward spiral of sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, so she trades the temptations of California for a small, gray village in Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle. Now she is stuck in the company of all her jet-lagged—and mostly male—competitors, arriving from Japan, France, Armenia, Iran, and Colombia. Isolated as they are, the writers do what writers do: exchange compliments, nurse envy and private resentments, stab rivals in the back, and hop in bed together. All the while, Mona keeps stumbling across the mysterious traces of a violence she cannot explain. As her adventures in Scandinavia unfold, Mona finds that she has not so much escaped her demons as locked herself up with them in the middle of nowhere. In Mona, Pola Oloixarac paints a hypnotic, scabrous, and ultimately jaw-dropping portrait of a woman facing down a hipster elite to which she does and does not belong. A survivor of both patronization and bizarre sexual encounters, Mona is a new kind of feminist. But her past won’t stay past, and strange forces are working to deliver her the test of a lifetime.

A Novel

Mona

taylor miles hopkins

No doubt about it: not knowing each other's languages was the key to conviviality, because if we were able to read what everyone else was writing, if we were able to understand it and feel it like music, the Russian calmly concluded, well, then we'd be e murdering each other in our beds.

It's not that there are no more literary personalities in our era: it's just that now they come to places like these thinking they're writers and end up leaving as characters, The festivals are the real novels !"

The body, soma, is also a tomb, sema. The Etruscans believed that the human condition was to be tied to a body as it rotted; this was the only and most basic truth of life, and therefore, the only possible philosophy.

Writing is a mystical act…it traffics in energy. It is a dialogue with monsters. It conjures the state of limbo between the living and the dead.

"While you were talking, I was thinking…whatever distance we can put between ourselves and hatred? That's freedom that's all the freedom we're likely to get.”

“On the contrary: we write to try and get rid of the hate-colored glasses that make the world so stark and supposedly legible. Even when something becomes apparent and we're able to wrap our minds around it—maybe we don't want to tell everyone about it, don't want to rely on the codes in force, or use old words for new things. Maybe instead we just want to follow the snake back to its lair. Maybe we write to get down that hole, and figure out what's there, and come up with new words for it... Most people go through life trying to avoid that dark energy, and the mind trains itself to escape."

“I’d like to know the private life of my unconscious thoughts,” she said, more or less to herself.

Kat Albanese

“Everything disastrous that happened in the rest of the world happened first in South America. Donald Trump is just figuring out how to be a Banana Republic boss, and that’s already our specialty.”

We can never know what true poetry is, Mona reflected, but what makes a piece of writing recognizable as a poem is the feeling that you’re getting ripped off.

“In the era of techno-capitalism,” Raul once told her, “the sublime no longer exists; poetry, therefore, has to include a feeling of theft, an intuition of a comparison and competition—value itself should be totally accidental. What’s vital is to communicate the feeling of having somehow swindled language—that surely that couldn’t be a poem. If that couldn’t be a poem, that’s exactly why it was one.”

"And you know what else? There's no place for women in literature, either. There's nowhere for them-nowhere, and we know it. And that's why we make ourselves into freaks: we react and adapt to the state of things instinctively. We're not so different from Julian of Norwich, who wanted to be a saint so badly that she became a little indie nun, God's only lover. And why'd she do it? So that they'd leave her alone to write in her cloister, glory to God in heaven. Or Margery Kempe, who made herself an outsider in her own family-a ridiculous woman in red socks, as Chaucer described her-just so she could escape this world and flee into her own, where at last she'd be able to write.

Her caves and grottoes are your makeup and my obesity: they're our unnatural way of being in the world.”

Mona quotes

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