Mona

I’m judging a 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

“If she were run over by a train, of course, it would totally destroy her lady parts. Of what use to science could she be in that case? And getting sawed in half under the Caltrain would be a breach of her university fellowship...No: it was better to remain a woman, Hispanic, South American, body intact, praise be to Saint Judith Fucking Butler. Mona imagined blond and Indian doctors in their white coats, stupefied by her luxurious but inert tits. Her thoughts segued into an elaborate postmortem orgy at Stanford Medical Center.”
This passage is doing so much work, aside from being funny and astute we know just the kind of feminist we’re dealing with. I want more.

Mona is a writer of Peruvian decent on her way to Sweden to join a literary convention. When she wakes up the morning of her flight, she is bruised, but can’t remember what happened. No stranger to alcohol, she muddles her way through, trying to balance academia with her penchant for self-loathing. As a woman of color, Mona is aware of the ways in which people treat her at these very white, male centric conferences and the text become a rumination on what it means to be a woman and person of color in academia. The story is in parts dark and funny, contemplative and insightful. Thank you to Farrar, Straus & Giroux and NetGalley for the advanced review copy.

A quick and sharp read about a young writer's experiences while attending a literary festival in Sweden, as she wades through past trauma.

This was a good book and translation; it was intelligent and raw, blending significantly female experiences with those of being a writer and immigrant.

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.

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.