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 abroad. Mona, a Peruvian writer based in California, presents a tough and sardonic exterior: she likes drugs and cigarettes, has mysterious bruises on her neck, and pokes fun of American academic culture and its identity-fixation, of which she herself is a beneficiary: "In her role of overeducated Latina in the era of Trump, Mona experienced her serene captivity as a kind of freedom . . ." Nominated for "the most important literary prize in Europe," Mona sees a chance to escape her downward spiral of sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, and so trades the temptations of California for a small, gray village in Sweden. Now she is stuck in the company of all her jetlagged—and mostly male—competitors, arriving from Japan, Armenia, Iran, Iceland, Finland, and elsewhere. Isolated as they are, the writers do what writers do: complement each other, envy each other, stab each other in the back, and go to bed with one another. Finding she has not so much escaped her demons as locked herself up in the middle of nowhere with them, Mona's adventures in Scandinavia paint a hypnotic, scabrous, and finally jawdropping portrait of a woman facing down a hipster elite to which she both does and does not belong. Bearing scars that are by no means merely literary, Mona endures plagiarism, patronization, and endless lectures, until her past catches up with her, and she triumphs at last, in a truly apocalyptic fashion. "Pola Oloixarac is one of the great writers of the Internet, the only country larger than Argentina." —Joshua Cohen

A Novel

Mona

Not reading emails, in the heart of Silicon Valley, was tantamount to declaring oneself dead.

Kevin Cole

Maybe, Mona ventured, intellectualizing one's suffering was just the regional brand, in the same way that Marco signaled his Latin American bona fides by peppering his speech with references to Che Guevara and Luis Miguel, or the way Ab-dollah branded himself a Proud Muslim Invader. The ways that each of them appropriated their own local colors and used them as the backdrop for playing their parts in the theatrical literary market: these were just the modern tools of the trade, weapons in the battle royale of "world lit."

Kat Albanese

“Whatever distance we put between ourselves and hatred—that’s freedom.”

"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.”

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.”

“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.”

taylor miles hopkins

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

“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."

"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.”

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.

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.

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 !"

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.

Left me feeling like most of the questions brought up by this novel were left to kind of fade away, unanswered. Perhaps that was the intent.

Kind of what I want a character study to be but that ending really threw me for a loop

Nat Estrada

reann

Whimsical humor, verbose writing, and the pretentiousness of it all!! I have never scoffed and cringed and eye-rolled so hard! 

A satirical take on the distinct world of the literary academe and poking fun of what it means to be a writer, Mona by Pola Oloixarac is many things. With less than 200 pages, it talks about disassociation and trauma, identity politics, philosophical commentaries, and a peek into the literary scene and its community. While I think that it’s so easy to miss the stories between the lines with its winding narrative, the abrupt, out-of-nowhere ending got me together! I feel like it’s a satire within a satire, sorta kinda? 

I’m still not sure how I feel about this book but overall I give 1 star for the book cover, 1 star for the unhinged women trope, and 1 star for Pola Oloixarac!

well, i enjoyed it as much as i disliked it. i appreciated the reading experience and the general unfolding of the plot, it felt a bit like unwadding a ball of paper. i believe more could’ve happened in a general sense, but the pacing kept my attention. i found the end to be sudden and a bit bizarre in a way i didn’t love

༺ kat ༻

Imie Kent-Muller

Fraser Simons

An absolutely brilliant exercise in obfuscation reminiscent of Nobakov. Mona is basically a character that, were she a man—and she has, I’m sure intentionally, all of the hallmarks of that classic male author that is continually venerated for toxic qualities—would absolutely be more acceptable and relatable. Which is why she is a woman. Absolutely everything about her is made to provoke a negative reaction from the reader, when really it’s just the inclusion of the qualities people would attribute a person as a “ real character” in reality. 

There’s an unwillingness to dwell to much or too deeply in the personal. A number of vices on an endless chain of self medicating and maneuvering. But she’s also incredibly intelligent and is an active participant in the thing she hates most: the literary “scene” as it has now become. Because there’s absolutely an elephant in the room: America. Never really acknowledged, but always present, as she rails against ideas orbiting what we’d call identity politics. 

I don’t think Americans realize just how much of their culture they export. As a Canadian it is just constant. We see more news about America than Canada on social media now. They’re The Show, and that’s completely intentional. Some literature interrogate aspects of this, most self evident in the onslaught of death of the American dream narratives. Where immigrants buy into the idea of America only to enter the churn. The literary scene is no different. It’s not immune to internalizing culture purportedly to be avant garde and progressive, but is merely the newest exercise in exclusion and policing the culture of literally every single other country. 

Mona is the anthesis of this even as she plays into it out of necessity. The choices are to be in the game, hustling and engaging in performativism… or not published not known not eating. Simultaneously, the self medicating is in tandem with the social critique that I felt was on point and effective satire. Sure, it offends western culture. But it ought to. We have little to no control over our own narratives with social media and the rules of American civility fetishism and the way in which The Conversation must take place. 

It all comes to a head in a beautiful confluence of themes and notions bombarding the reader while it effectively points out that we generally all spend our time in a performative dance, completely, willfully, subscribed to Missing The Point.

Gacy

Dalia Ergas

Alithea

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.

Mona A Novel

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