For the longest time after the advent of publishing, the world of letters remained a network of self-contained communities moored to a specific geography, be it a city, a country, or a region. But from late 20th century onwards, thanks to the magical properties of globalisation, a proliferation of creative writing courses, writing workshops, writer residencies, and fellowships lured writers from different parts of the post-colonial world to the universities of the world’s only superpower.
Multiple cultural geographies receded to the background, setting the stage for a ‘world literary scene’ populated by a diverse (in terms of cultural symbolism) yet unitary elite of jet-setting, festival-hopping, ruthlessly networking writer-performers who keep bumping into each other at different venues, not unlike the conference-hopping literary impresarios in David Lodge’s Small World (1984). While Lodge had trained his guns on literature professors, in Argentinian author Pola Oloixarac’s Mona, it is the writers who are in the crosshairs.
Coveted meet
As the novel opens, Mona, a rising star from Peru pursuing a doctorate at Stanford, gets invited to ‘The Meeting’, a literature festival in Sweden that will culminate in the presentation of the prestigious Basske-Wortz Prize. “Two hundred thousand euros, thirteen finalists, one winner.”
The events in Mona unfold through the vaporous haze of the titular character’s drug-addled brain, which has dialled down the reality settings of her consciousness to ‘low’. Under pressure to produce a ‘masterpiece’ as a follow-up to her sensational literary debut, Mona’s aim at the literary gathering is to escape the proceedings without drawing attention. She skips many of the ‘sessions’, preferring the company of substances to that of people. The provocative admixture of theory and sex that marked out Oloixarac’s first novel, Savage Theories, reappears in Mona, with erotic fantasies punctuated by sardonic observations on how identity politics has taken over the literary avant-garde, turning even revolutionaries into poseurs.
Mona herself, as a Peruvian, has enjoyed all the benefits of being cultural exotica on a North American campus. In her doctoral application, she “had clicked ‘Hispanic, Indigenous’ and typed ‘Inca’ in the box underneath” because “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.” Of course, she realises later that “it would have been even more advantageous to add on some kind of physical disability — a slight but evident defect — but nobody’s perfect.”
Through the persona of Mona, the novel renders ‘world literature’ — invitees to The Meeting include writers from Armenia, Iran, Israel, Macedonia, Peru, Algeria, South Korea, Albania, Iceland and Colombia, among others — as little more than a farcical export of American campus politics with its trademark obsessions of race, colour and diversity.
A telling passage depicts the reaction of the celebrated authors when it is discovered, during a tour of Stockholm, that the Armenian poet is missing: “Did anyone remember what he looked like? Nobody seemed capable of recalling a single characteristic feature except for the fact that he was an Armenian poet. Maybe he had curly brown hair? But was he short or tall? What did he look like? ‘How should I know what he looks like? He looks like an Armenian poet!’ yelled one of the Arab writers from the back of the van.”
Ninja attack
Writers are individualists. They either do not like to follow the herd or do not like to be seen doing so. But in an event of this kind, to an extent, they must. A lit fest, by forcing raging egomaniacs into the company of other raging egomaniacs for extended periods of time — eating, sharing a car ride, waiting their turn at the bar, doing their business at adjacent stalls in the urinal — presents tremendous opportunities for satire, and Oloixarac takes all of them. Her prose — superbly translated by Adam Morris — operates with the quiet but deadly efficiency of a ninja. At first you feel nothing, then you sense something trickling down your torso, and as you slowly look down, you notice with horror the dagger sticking out of your chest.
In one such comic set piece, the slim and glamorous Mona is accosted in the sauna by Lena, an obese woman who had served as her interpreter at a lit fest in France but is now an award-winning children’s writer. Mona, her towel slipping, is naked, sweating, and without her glasses, unable to recognise her interlocutor. She wants to be left alone. But Lena, determined to obtain some validation, holds Mona captive as she replays their entire conversation from the past — about how writers are monsters. Trapped in an overheated exchange — in every sense of the term — Mona reflects that “this fat power trip, Lena’s exultant obesity — it was the only sensible minority position within the reach of a white Frenchwoman.”
It is hinted throughout that Mona is struggling with some form of emotional dislocation. But the two narrative strands — the literary jousts around the Basske-Wortz Prize and Mona’s mysterious private trauma — fail to meld, leaving the ending unsatisfactory. Nonetheless, Oloixarac, who is at her best skewering the pretensions of the literary world, has delivered a novel worth savouring for the satirical brilliance of its prose alone.
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
Mona; Pola Oloixarac, trs Adam Morris, Serpent’s Tail, ₹1,272
