This gritty, daring novel has a unique way to play with narrative conventions and I really enjoyed reading it, although in the end, it does not quite come together. Mona is a young Peruvian writer of mixed heritage who resides in California. One morning, she wakes up bruised and without being able to recollect what happened to her the night before. A regular drinker and drug aficionada, she takes no time to find out: She boards a plane to Sweden to join an international literary convention that will culminate in awarding one participant a highly prestigious prize. Throughout the text, Mona tries to focus on this prize while hiding her bruises, but she is haunted by an event she can't recall...

This text is many things at once: A rumination about violence against women, a satire on the professionalized literary world and identity politics as a weapon to market people and books, a drug novel, and a multi-layered play with clichés (sometimes just perpetuating them, sometimes showing people ridiculing or instrumentalizing them - these opposing strategies have a confusing effect, and I believe it's intentional). Mona is a female woman of color, and in the context of her profession, her identity becomes a USP, an "identitarian fantasy" she both uses and despises -this protagonist has a keen eye for the implications for herself and the literary world around her, where "personal essays that report(ed) on their personal truth in the post-truth era" are in fashion (yes, this text can be very funny as well).

But ultimately, the descriptive style can sometimes become slightly grading, especially in those parts that revel in national clichés when portraying other writers (the enigmatic Icelandic poet, the composed, elegant Japanese poet etc.) - and the ending is just silly (I mean, I see what she does there, but pfff....come on). Still, Argentinian shooting star Pola Oloixarac is a highly interesting writer that aims to show new angles and package them in unusual narrative set-ups. I'm curious what she will come up with next.

Deliciously scathing and dark. It is an indulgent book, as writing about writing tends to be, but if you have the appetite for that, it's definitely worth the read. Oloixarac paints a photorealistic picture of an intellectual bubble and bursts it, at the end, in the most satisfying way. You'll enjoy this book if you don't take yourself too seriously while reading it.

If the first few chapters of a book make you roll your eyes more than say ten times...maybe tis best to call things off. Mona tries really hard to be funny and subversive. The novel's attempts to be 'gritty' or 'edgy' fall painfully short.
Mona, our titular main character, is not like other girls. She's a Peruvian writer who is lives in California. When she's applying for her PhD to various universities she claims to have indigenous ancestry, because...reasons? When her ethnicity seems to offer her "the opportunity to advance her career" she realises that "it would have been ever more advantageous to add on some kind of physical disability—a slight but evident defect". Isn't she just so edgy? #notlikeotherprotagonists
The writing left a lot to be desired:
➜"Maybe the pain was a pupa inside of her, Mona thought: an amorphous substance awaiting the formation of a new exoskeleton"
➜"her toes lined up like a sinister family of faceless dwarves"
➜"Dicks were radars of attention, erotic antennae made for detecting every contour of desire in their surroundings".
➜"Mona inserted her earbuds and slid her phone, snakelike, to the front of her leggings, so that the little hole for the charger was perpendicular to her clit" (WTF? Why be so specific? Knowing that the hole of her phone is perpendicular to her clit adds nothing to that scene.)

Also, it seems that the only way to establish that your character is sex positive is to make her constantly think of dicks, force a security guard to pat her crotch, and give a virtual blow job to a guy (all of this happens within the first two chapters....).

Lastly, we have this Italian guy who says "Vieni più vicino al cazzo"...and it just doesn't right (it has a vague google translator feel to it). And of course, because he is Italian and he is getting virtual head he has to recite Italian verses (Guido Cavalcanti). And we get this assessment about him: "Franco was the kind of Italian you could only find in the United States, or really anywhere outside of Italy. Or, as Franco more succinctly put it: he was tall. The fundamental axis of his existence was to prove that, no, Italians are not all warm, friendly, or sweet. Or maybe they are, but only when they're low to the ground and have even lower self-esteem".
Boy, I must be a walking and talking contradiction then.

The narrative's attempt at humour are not really doing anything for me. I'm sure that there are plenty of other readers who are willing to read this novel but I ain't one of them.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the early ebook. Mona, a Peruvian novelist currently at Stanford, wakes up to find bruises all up and down one side of her body and no memory of how they got there. She gets an alert on her phone that reminds her that her first book is nominated for a prestigious literary award in Sweden, with a large cash award, and she decides this is a very good time to get out of town. Mona will spend four days in a small village where her fellow nominees from all over the world will give talks (mostly about the politics in their corner of the world, although Mona is alone in noticing that one nominee has just copied pages and pages of a Beckett novel and is passing them off as his own thoughts) all while Mona is drinking, getting high with her vape pen, watching porn and desperately trying to ignore the messages from back home, even as they get more and more menacing. This is such a smart book with great characters and an unforgettable lead in Mona.

I recall liking Savage Theories, I DNF-ed Dark Constellations (got more than halfway through and the story just didn't seem to be coming together), and I DNF-ed this one after chapter 1. The critique of US identity politics by having Mona (who's clearly coded as a white Peruvian) claim to be indigenous to score points at her university and in the art world is... not it. Just not interested in spending my time on this book.

Mona was being vetted for a particular purpose and the content was far more sexually explicit than was appropriate for the project at hand. I didn't feel this was conveyed by the description of the book. The character of Mona seemed interesting and the premise of the book was intriguing, but I felt like I was reading a different book than the one described by the marketing content.