Arnon Grunberg

Savage

Books

On gimmicks and readers – Adam Thirlwell in LRB:

“Pola Oloixarac has written three novels, though calling them novels seems too reassuringly bland. They’re baroquely layered with ideas, hacker theory, anthropology, natural history, mythology, dystopias. I admire them very much, but reading them can also bring moments of boredom or impatience. Ideas are allowed to expand in unexpected habitats. Oloixarac’s characters give complicated lectures, get lost in unwinnable arguments, write arcane texts: they invent theories the same way other animals invent shells or camouflage – as strategies of protection and self-concealment.
Mona, first published in Spanish in 2019 (Oloixarac is Argentinian), looks at first to be simpler than her previous two books, but in fact it’s just as extravagant. It tells the story of Mona Tarrile-Byrne, a Peruvian writer studying at Stanford whose first novel has won so much international acclaim that she has been nominated for the Basske-Wortz Prize, ‘the most important literary award in Europe and one of the most prestigious in the world’. The award ceremony is held at Sweden’s most prestigious literary festival, situated idyllically next to a lake. What follows is a swift and compact description of Mona’s time at the festival, with all its literary conversation and jargon and self-serving theorising.
At this point I need to interrupt with a spoiler, because it’s hard to discuss Mona except in terms of its late revelations, and these revelations are savage.”

(…)

“Everything in the book is refracted through Mona – a distorted version of a younger Oloixarac, whose first novel, Savage Theories, was both feted and attacked in Latin America for its provocative sarcasm towards intellectual orthodoxies. What kind of writer is Mona? Extrapolating from the views of her critics and translators, we detect an aura of high seriousness. Early on, we discover that Mona’s first book has been praised by ‘the august critic Jorge Rufini’ for its rejection of ‘autofiction’ and ‘micropolitics’. Rufini admires her writing for its ‘marriage of politics and literature, the sancta sanctorum of the Latin American Boom’. Later, Mona has a depressing, awkward call with her French translator about her current manuscript – but this may be the flip side of the kind of book Mona writes. ‘The characters are difficult,’ the translator tells her. ‘The dialogue is practically incomprehensible. It made me ask myself: am I really expected to make an effort to understand? Seriously? Why do I have to make such an effort? If I don’t make the effort, am I just stupid, according to this book?’”

(…)

“A literary festival, according to this book, is just an intense form of everyday life: people try to define who you are or what you should be. They try to interfere with your outline.
Here is Mona, a Latin American woman writer, and she wants only to be herself: pure and unique. She goes to a sauna, and is lectured by a female children’s writer on how to be a woman: ‘Look at you. Yes, you. You’re a complete caricature of a woman. Have you looked at yourself? You’re completely ridiculous.’ A Colombian writer sees her as a fellow Latin American. But Mona isn’t so easily confined: The phony solidarity of having a ‘Latin’ culture in common with other writers was something that always repulsed her. And socially – that is, in the global society of writers, the society to which she belonged, albeit in a forcefully reluctant and itinerant way – there was nothing worse than falling in with a bunch of déclassé monolinguals. Mona felt much more comfortable in the company of other languages. That is, she preferred to live en traducción, according to her literary tastes.
Mona cultivates a fantasy of identity as something extraterritorial and free-roaming. Sometimes she switches language, as with the trio of little poems she writes in French. But mostly she plays with the varieties of Latin American Spanish, a language that looks like one language, but which is really multiple: The ruminative phase of the trip was over: next came the real fooling around. By this she didn’t refer to any specific regimen; she certainly didn’t intend to make a fool of herself, as a literal translation might indicate: ser tonta en los alrededores – although that was always a possibility. No, in situations like this one, the expression could mean any number of things, anything from no-strings-attached seductions to merely allowing herself to be invaded by a jovial spirit of playfulness – she’d irse en yolo, as they said in Lima, or what in Argentina they called hacer cualquiera. In international waters, without a compass: at times like these, with no other task than simply to be, even if being was nothing more than being a cocotte, a being fundamentally without any ties, and therefore without limitations, but nevertheless (and more than ever) a woman, Mona embraced her liberty the way the blind embrace the darkness. It was merely her element, impossible to avoid.
There’s something disturbing in this apparently exuberant passage: the blind don’t choose darkness, it’s imposed on them.”

(…)

“Another term for the novel of ideas, according to Sianne Ngai, is the gimmick: ‘We might define the novel of ideas precisely by its intimate relation to the gimmick form.’ Certainly it’s difficult to let ideas flourish in a novel – in direct addresses to the reader, or in characters’ speeches – without it all seeming willed and artificial. But Oloixarac’s writing is exciting because of its total commitment to maxing out ideas, its demonstration that ideas can move through a novel in various ways – not only through dialogue and narration but also through descriptions and minor similes – and be transformed, in the same way a character may be.”

Read the review here.

I sympathize with the idea that literary festivals are everyday life, just slightly more intense.

And it’s good to underline the specificity of language, maybe even dialect, where the un-specificity of globalized English has become self-evident. The global, better-educated community loves to discuss identity, gender and other tender subjects in this un-specific globalized English, also because of the lack of an alternative.

You should never judge a book on a review, although I would put this review in the drawer “devastating compliments” – but I’m not convinced that we should abandon scenes and dialogue in favor of ideas.
For one, if you are convinced of your ideas write an essay.
The novel exists because the author is not convinced of his own ideas, otherwise he would have been a philosopher. A priest. A politician. Or a terrorist.

Despite all the devasting compliments I’m curious enough to give Oloixarac a try.

discuss on facebook