From the critically acclaimed author of Savage Theories and Dark Constellations comes Pola Oloixarac’s Mona,
where success as a "writer of color" proves to be a fresh hell for a
young Latin American woman at a literary conference in Sweden.
Mona,
a Peruvian writer based in California, presents a tough and sardonic
exterior. She likes drugs and cigarettes, and when she learns that she
is something of an anthropological curiosity―a woman writer of color
treasured at her university for the flourish of rarefied diversity she
brings―she pokes fun at American academic culture and its fixation on
identity.
When she is nominated for “the most important literary
award in Europe,” Mona sees a chance to escape her downward spiral of
sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, so she trades the
temptations of California for a small, gray village in Sweden, close to
the Arctic Circle. Now she is stuck in the company of all her
jet-lagged―and mostly male―competitors, arriving from Japan, France,
Armenia, Iran, and Colombia. Isolated as they are, the writers do what
writers do: exchange compliments, nurse envy and private resentments,
stab rivals in the back, and hop in bed together. All the while, Mona
keeps stumbling across the mysterious traces of a violence she cannot
explain.
As her adventures in Scandinavia unfold, Mona finds
that she has not so much escaped her demons as locked herself up with
them in the middle of nowhere. In Mona, Pola Oloixarac paints a
hypnotic, scabrous, and ultimately jaw-dropping portrait of a woman
facing down a hipster elite to which she does and does not belong. A
survivor of both patronization and bizarre sexual encounters, Mona is a
new kind of feminist. But her past won’t stay past, and strange forces
are working to deliver her the test of a lifetime.
