Argentinian writer Pola Oloixarac impressed readers with her previous books, the controversial Savage Theories (2017), in which she mocks academia, and Dark Constellations (2019), a science fiction-cyberpunk frolic. Her new novel, Mona, displays her talent for imaginative and measured prose that, for some readers, may evoke the combined qualities of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Joan Didion. In Mona, Oloixarac also captures the essence of Julio Cortázar and Roberto Bolaño – members of the Latin American boom and post-boom respectively. Because Oloixarac embraces the avant-garde, like Cortázar, and because she wrote about Argentina’s Dirty War in Savage Theories, she makes a strong case to be regarded as a leader of a new Latin American literary movement.
In Mona, Oloixarac’s prose is presented by translator Adam Morris in stream akin to Patrick Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. Her unreliable narrator, Mona, is a Peruvian author who is a finalist for the Basske-Wortz Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Europe. When she boards a plane, high on valium, from San Francisco to Stockholm for the pre-award lectures and ceremony, she carries an uncomfortable secret with her. This is why Mona arrives in Stockholm open to getting stoned at any moment. In Stockholm, she, with the other finalists, gives a lecture and participates in the social events hosted by the award committee. The finalists – Mona, Philippe from France, Gemma from Azerbaijan, Chrystos from Macedonia, and Marco from Columbia – discuss an array of literary topics including the intersection of technology and literature:
“So what does my South American mind, steeped in a Marxist education, have to say about all this? If Google is the great novel of our era, and the creator of this new genre of objective realism, then the future of the human novel might be something like a hack, a mechanism of clandestine writing.”
Between debates and palavers, the authors skinny dip in a Nordic lake, take group saunas, drink, and dance before diving into bed with each other. But it is Mona’s secret that constantly haunts her (and the reader), driving the narrative: “Mona looked down at her body like someone standing at the edge of a cliff. How long did bruises last?” She tries to mask her pain by drinking, popping pills, watching porn, and having Skype sex. Oloixarac keeps Mona in a fugue state to ensure that the reader experiences the book’s events just as Mona does: “Rather, it was the sensation of losing consciousness that Mona associated with pleasure.” And Mona is the only finalist who “found the cadavers of two animals” since arriving in Stockholm. What does this mean? Did she, high on booze and valium, like Agave in The Bacchae, rip apart, and eat, the two animals? The author does not divulge the answer, but this passage foreshadows the fantastical dénouement.
Because she is inspired by the Latin American boom, Oloixarac references the movement in discussion at Stockholm: “But the reason it all [boom] happens is just because once upon a time some people enjoyed being around certain other people. Without love, without this glue to hold things together, there is no avant-garde, no movements.” Her secret may be divulged, and like Garcia Márquez did in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Oloixarac weaves mythology into Mona, tipping her cap to a popular Norse myth in the epic ending.
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Nona Fernández is a Chilean actress, author, and playwright, and her novel, The Twilight Zone, reflects her background. She asks for reader participation, with the help of award-winning translator Natasha Wimmer (Roberto Bolaño, Mario Vargas Llosa), inviting the reader to follow the unnamed narrator’s journey through the horrific Pinochet reign of terror. From 1973 through 1990, under Pinochet’s direction, thousands of Chileans disappeared, forever, into what the author calls The Twilight Zone.
The story begins in 1984 when a former Pinochet executor or —The Man Who Tortured People — confesses his atrocities to an opposition magazine, Cauce. The unnamed narrator, a documentarian and TV script writer, relies on her reportage skills and her memory to tell the story of The Man Who Tortured People. The author alternates her narrative between past and present: “The first time I saw him was on the cover of a magazine. It was a copy of Cauce, the kind of thing I read back then. The second time I saw him was twenty-five years later. I was working as a writer for a television series, and one of the main characters was based on him.”
Like her 2019 novel Space Invaders, Fernández employs pop culture references to drive the narrative and place the reader in that era. For example, when she describes a scene in which The Man Who Tortured People is ensconced in a van escaping to France, she incorporates a Ghostbusters line: “If there’s something strange/in your neighborhood/who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!” Later, as she participates in a memorial walk for two victims, the author brings in the lyrics of Billy Joel’s 1989 “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” in which 40 years of history are shoehorned into a five-minute ditty: Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray, South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television … This is a significant passage because she gives the victims’ names – Parada and Guerrero – and she sings the chorus in her head as she imagines the crimes The Secret Police committed, etching the period of the disappeared peoples in her history book. Fernández masterfully reprises the role of Estrella from Space Invaders: “Like a little Martian from Space Invaders she flies apart into colored lights. Estrella collapses in the fetal position, dying instantly.”
She uses Rod Serling’s TV show The Twilight Zone as a metaphor for life during the Pinochet dictatorship. During the despot’s reign, the citizens of Chile lived in their own twisted, nightmarish world. One day a man could be dragged out of his house and killed; on another day, a man kisses his family goodbye and then commits a heinous act: “One March morning in 1985, we heard a disturbing report on the radio. The announcer described what he called a gruesome discovery. Three bodies had turned up with their throats slashed – degollados – on a bleak stretch of the road to Pudahuel Airport.”
The description of a poster depicting types of torture techniques encapsulates Fernández’s painful memories and brings the reader into just how treacherous it was to live in Chile the 1980s: “On one I read submarino. Next to the handwritten word I see the drawing of a naked man with his head in a bucket of water or maybe urine. Two men are holding him down. From the drawing I understand that the intent was to cause the detainee to come close to drowning.”
For all the painful memories of the Los Desaparecidos, The Twilight Zone will remind readers of Lawrence Thornton’s Imagining Argentina. And Fernández’s nimble movement of the narrative and characters in and out of the decades of a despotic leaderships may remind readers of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
At the fulcrum of both books are the authors’ abilities to write distinctly and to highlight Latin American culture, which will remind us of their predecessors — Cortázar, Garcia Márquez, and Bolaño. Like those of fellow Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra and fellow Argentinian author César Aira, Fernández’s and Oloixarac’s inimitable talents are paving the way for a new movement, one that Roberto Bolaño would endorse.
Mona. Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on March 16, 2021, 176 pages, $25.00 hardcover; The Twilight Zone. Published by Graywolf Press on March 16, 2021, 219 pages, $15.99 paperback]