Beneath the surface of this sly literary satire is a meditation on hidden trauma. By Emily Rhodes
Mona is the enjoyably mischievous and daring third novel by Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac, one of Granta’s 2010 best young Spanish-language novelists, skilfully rendered in translation by Adam Morris. We first encounter the eponymous protagonist as she takes a break from her teaching post at a Californian university, leaving campus for Sweden to spend a few days with other writers shortlisted for a literary award.
Mona immediately proves to be enjoyably sardonic company, imparting wry comments while self-administering a cocktail of drugs, coffee and alcohol. She explains, for instance, that she wrote “Inca” on a form about her ethnicity because: “This was Silicon Valley, right? She might as well try to Lean In. Anchoring her identity to a brutal and exquisite empire about which so little was known would provide her with an ideal costume for the university’s tribal masquerade.”
The consortium for the Swedish literary prize, together with the other writers attending, provides Mona with ample material for scornful dissection. Oloixon arac’s portraits of this international set are acerbically comic; there’s Akto, for example, so obsessed with dead languages that he gleefully recites Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” in Latin (“Responsum est, mi amice, in vento flante exsurgebat . . . ”); Carmina — Albanian, but self-styled as “una donna italiana!” — looking “like she’d just walked out of a detective novel in which her destiny was to be murdered by a minor character”; and Philippe, who hopes (in vain) that no one will notice his attempt to pass off the work of Samuel Beckett as his own.
Intriguingly, Oloixarac has stated in interviews that these colourful characters are all based Oloixon real writers she’s met. In this novel, she brings them together and adds intoxicants and a lakeside setting as a backdrop for laughably pretentious conversations about literature and politics, interspersed with illicit shenanigans in various states of undress.
Oloixarac portrays Mona as someone who can wittily explain away everyone and everything. This makes the book’s central mystery — why is her body covered in bruises? — all the more perplexing.
There are clues: Mona’s appetite for substance abuse; a series of menacing unanswered texts; a moment when she brims over with tears for a pain that “burns like some kind of shame”.
We must, however, wait for her to remember exactly what happened, a revelation that occurs as her Nordic surroundings are threatened by apocalyptic collapse. As the ground shudders and the lake begins to churn, she retreats into her body and “hugged herself, a ball of flesh and hair”, a pose that releases painful recollections.
In portraying Mona’s private trauma alongside the ruin of the outside world, Oloixarac vividly and persuasively suggests just how world-shattering acts of sexual violence can be. With this double climax of annihilation shown to be tragically insurmountable, the author brings the vibrant world of this novel and its forceful protagonist to “nothing”, the final word of the book.
source: ft.com