Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Savage Theories
WORK NOTES: trans by Roy Kesey
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/13/1977
WEBSITE:
CITY: San Francisco
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Argentine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pola_Oloixarac * https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/savage-theories-by-pola-oloixarac
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 13, 1977.
EDUCATION:Stanford University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, translator. The Buenos Aires Review bilingual journal, founding editor.
AWARDS:Best Young Spanish Novelists, Grant, 2010; literary award from Fondo Nacional de las Artes.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including New York Times, Telegraph, Rolling Stone, Folha de Sao Paulo, Revista Clarín, Etiqueta Negra, Quimera, Brando, América Economía, among others.
Savage Theories (Las teorías salvajes, 2008), has been translated in French, Dutch, Finnish, Italian and Portuguese.
SIDELIGHTS
Pola Oloixarac was brought up in Argentina, but now lives in San Francisco. She is a writer, journalist, and translator, and the contributor of many articles and essays to publications, including New York Times, Telegraph, Rolling Stone, Granta, Folha de Sao Paulo, Revista Clarín, Etiqueta Negra, Quimera, Brando, and América Economía, among others.
In 2017, she published Savage Theories, the English-language version of Teorías salvajes, first published in Argentina in 2008. Narrated by an unnamed character, the book threads several storylines: Rosa Ostreech is bogged down in completing her thesis. As a distraction, she tries to seduce an older professor. Lovers Kamtchowsky and Pabst engage in pornographic adventures and a Dutch anthropologist works on a theory of evolution based on the practices of our primate ancestors.
Booklist reviewer Diego Bdez was impressed with the work and wrote: “Though the novel is daunting in substance and structure, with a wide range of cultural references … readers willing to indulge this careening carousel of a novel will be rewarded with an unexpectedly prescient experience.” Not as taken with the novel was Library Journal contributor Lawrence Olszewski, who commented: “Though the inclusion of blogs, video games, and viral videos into mainstream literature is appealing, it’s not enough to offset the recondite style and pseudointellectual pose.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer observed: “Perhaps best of all is Oloixarac’s prose: discursive, surprising, and off-kilter–like the characters themselves, it reveals a ceaseless appetite for understanding and belonging.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote that “while there are echoes of Borges and Bolano here, the synthesis of ideas and the manic intelligence are wholly new. Brilliant, original, and very fun to read.”
Words without Borders website reviewer David Varno praised the book, while also highlighting its complexities, writing: “Savage Theories compels with its energetic, spleen-filled characters, and the seamless blend of desire and theorizing is contagious on both fronts, but the book is a difficult read. There are many digressions and red herrings. It takes time to get one’s bearings and identify the themes and action that are at work under the surface and eventually tie everything together. The effect is destabilizing, and prevents the reader from sharing a knowing smirk with Rosa when she lands a sharp linguistic barb. We are implicated along with everyone else, which I believe is Oloixarac’s intention, and the effect deepens the experience of her novel.” A Rumpus website contributor wrote: “Savage Theories presents a deep-focus tableau wherein theory and praxis, subject and object, past and present share a single stage in an ongoing, immemorial drama. … At times the tone strays into a superficial pop sensibility, but Oloixarac’s creative force is ferocious, comprehensive, tidal. Her debut novel formulates one of the most thoroughgoing theories of the way we live now.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 1, 2016, Diego Bdez, review of Savage Theories, p. 26.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2016, review of Savage Theories.
Library Journal, December 1, 2016, Lawrence Olszewski, review of Savage Theories, p. 87.
Publishers Weekly, October 31, 2016, review of Savage Theories, p. 51.
ONLINE
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (June 8, 2017), review of Savage Theories.
Words without Borders, https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/ (January 1, 2017), David Varno, review of Savage Theories.*
Pola Oloixarac
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pola Oloixarac
Occupation Writer, journalist, translator
Pola Oloixarac is an Argentinian writer, journalist, and translator.
Contents
1 Biography
2 Savage Theories
3 Selected Bibliography
4 References
5 External links
Biography
In 2010, she was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young Spanish Novelists.[1] In the same year, she was invited to participate in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She is the recipient of a literary award from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes.[2] She studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, and has contributed articles for various publications such as The New York Times, The Telegraph, Rolling Stone, Folha de Sao Paulo, Revista Clarín, Etiqueta Negra, Quimera, Brando, América Economía, among other media. Her bestselling first novel, Savage Theories (Las teorías salvajes, 2008), has been translated in French, Dutch, Finnish, Italian and Portuguese.
Savage Theories will be published in English translation by Soho Press.
Pola Oloixarac has been invited to present her work and views on literature at different international forums and universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, University of Toronto, University of Florida, Americas Society, and literary festivals including Jaipur Literature Festival, LIWRE in Finland, Hay Cartagena, FLIP Brasil, Miami Book Fair, Marathon des Mots in Toulouse, FIL Lima, Crossing Borders Antwerp/ The Hague, among others.
She's a founding editor of The Buenos Aires Review bilingual journal featuring contemporary literature in the Americas http://www.buenosairesreview.org/.
Savage Theories
Savage Theories provoked critical and cultural controversy upon its release, with its subject matter and Oloixarac's public image coming under scrutiny.[3] According to Oloixarac, "[t]he book has sparked verbal violence and a sexist uproar precisely because it doesn't deal with the issues that are traditionally associated with 'women's literature,' but instead contains a sociological critique that is both intelligent and satirical, which are apparently traits solely reserved for men."[4]
Selected Bibliography
Las teorías salvajes (Buenos Aires: Alpha Decay, 2014)
Las constelaciones oscuras (Buenos Aires: Random House, 2015)
Hay Festival Cartagena: Pola Oloixarac
Bestselling Argentinian novelist Pola Oloixarac is part of a new generation of Latin American writers, haunted by the ghosts of Bolaño and Borges.
Pola Oloixarac, the Argentinian novelist, will be appearing at the Hay Festival Cartagena
Pola Oloixarac, the Argentinian novelist, will be appearing at the Hay Festival Cartagena
12:56PM GMT 24 Jan 2011
The first book I read by Mario Vargas Llosa was Pantaleón y las visitadoras (in English translation, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service). I was 12, mostly enamoured with Edgar Allan Poe, and I had no idea that books could be so utterly hilarious and sexy – and this, by way of making a political critique to the military! I have consistently devoured every Vargas Llosa since. When he won the Nobel Prize last year, the divisions among his wide Latin American fan base, stirred by Vargas Llosa’s move to the libertarian right in the Nineties, appeased. Everybody was entitled to love him in the open again.
Prizes and controversy feed the lives of world-stage writers. But it’s a well-known fact that nothing looks as good on your CV as death. Life’s tableau seems thus complete, a work of art in itself. It was certainly the case with Roberto Bolaño, one of the most exciting authors writing in Spanish in recent times, who died in 2003, before his work became widely translated.
Roberto Bolaño is also an author whose literary life speaks volumes about the globalized Spanish-language world. Chilean by birth, Bolaño chose Mexico City as his emigré home and dreamland for his fiction, while taking the language of Argentine masters Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar to re-imagine the epic dream of the Latin American Novel; he passed away in his home in the little town of Blanes, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. And it wasn’t just his prose that broke with tradition. It was the first time a Latin American writer was not first feted in Paris. Actually, Bolaño had been pretty much left alone at his booth at the Salon du Livre in Paris – the myth has him sitting there bored at an empty signing – whereas it only took a few years to see his name blowing away the English-speaking market. Rumours of a new state of publishing arose. The French had missed it – and if they missed a talent like Bolaño’s, how many others where they missing?
A coup was now in the works between the Western titans of the spoken tongues, English and Spanish.
At a time when a great deal of new writing has grown institutionalised through university-taught writing programmes, a figure like Bolaño kept the charm of old-time bohemia intact. “Sometimes, aspiring writers moon about some guy tortured in Soviet Rusia, and kind of wish they had been there too, to write more vividly,” I was told by Daniel Castro, an American-born Cuban writer with a fellowship at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. Who but Bolaño had such a great story to sell about himself – a story nearly as good as his prose?
Related Articles
Stars who will be at the 2011 Telegraph Hay Festival 19 Jan 2011
Hay Festival Cartagena 2011 22 Dec 2010
Hay Festival Quiz 01 Jan 2011
100 reasons to be excited about culture in 2011 03 Jan 2011
Across Latin America, characters from the guerilla era had dandyfied themselves along with the gentrification of their cities; theirs was the less glamorous tale of neoliberalism and nostalgia. As the key writers of the boom wound down and the old formula collided with fact – García Márquez’s support of the Castro regime despite the violations to the human rights should ring a bell – other movements, like The Crack, attempted to create a new identity of urban Latin America. None of these writers gained as much momentum as the former generation, nor became as endearing to the international public. Only Bolaño remained poetic enough to the marketing muses.
In the 21st century, the renewal of the Spanish novel has come on strong, as if, after all the attempted parricides and movements, literature was, again, a matter of individual creation. One feels that Mario Bellatin, an exquisite experimental writer from Peru, has done much more on his own to contribute to the renovation of the funhouse of the Spanish language, as is the case of towering Argentinian novelist and critic Ricardo Piglia, whose work continues to inspire the younger generations. Cult writers like Edgardo Cozarinsky and the late Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill have joined the ranks of authors published by independent houses, who offer a first home to new writing talent across the Spanish-speaking world: Almadía (México), Estruendomudo (Perú), Editorial Hum (Uruguay), Mansalva (Argentina), to name a few.
New places for the imagination seem open, as writers thrive in the midst of a burgeoning literary scene, in the land of undead, beautiful ghosts.
Hay Festival
Culture »
Book news »
External Links
Hay Festival official site
In Hay Festival
Sky and Kia Ballantyne at the Hay Festival 2015
Hay Festival: in quotes
Author Polly Samson with her husband, Pink Floyd singer and guitarist David Gilmour, at Hay Festival 2015
Hay Festival 2015: in pictures and quotes
The Lady in th Van
Alan Bennett on The Lady in the Van
Greg Wise and Kate Winslet as John Willoughby and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility
Sex, sea air and stupidity: 5 things we learned about Jane Austen
Dennis Lehane at Hay Festival 2015
10 rules for making it as a writer
Sky and Kia Ballantyne at the Hay Festival 2015
Hay Festival: in quotes
Pola Oloixarac is a fiction writer and essayist. Her novels, Savage Theories and Dark Constellations, have been translated into seven languages. Her writing has appeared in n+1, The White Review, The New York Times, and Granta, which named her to its list of Best Young Spanish Novelists. She wrote the libretto for the opera Hercules in Mato Grosso, which debuted at Buenos Aires’s Teatro Colón and was staged at New York City’s Dixon Place. She lives in San Francisco, where she’s completing a PhD at Stanford University. Savage Theories is her first novel to appear in English.
A writer and translator, Oloixarac’s first novel, Las teorias salvajes, was published in Argentina (2008), Spain (2010) and Peru (2010) and will soon be translated into French, Dutch and Portuguese. In 2010 she was awarded the Argentinian National Endowment for the Arts and is currently in residence at the International Writing Program at the Unviersity of Iowa. She has a philosophy degree from the University of Buenos Aires and has written on culture and technology for various magazines. She has been writing since she was a child and likes taking bubble baths. Her blog is www.melpomenemag.blogspot.com.
Interview: Pola Oloixarac on a New Opera at Teatro Colón
A sketch for the set of the new opera. (Image: Courtesy Luna Paiva)
Martha Cargo
September 19, 2014
Earlier this summer, Music of the Americas explored the ongoing collaboration between the Teatro Colón and the Americas Society. In the last year, Americas Society expanded its relationship with the Colón, one of the leading opera houses in the Western Hemisphere, by initiating a partnership with the Centro de Experimentación del Teatro Colón (CETC). Through the CETC, the Colón is able to establish an environment in which composers can create, audiences can get to know new works, and musicians can enjoy the challenges of premiering them. Music of the Americas had the unique opportunity to learn about the process of production for a new opera, Hercules en el Matto Grosso, due to have its premiere later this fall in Buenos Aires and its U.S. premiere at Americas Society in Spring 2015. Americas Society's Martha Cargo speaks with the opera's librettist Pola Oloixarac.
Background on the Work
Hercules en el Matto Grosso centers on Hércules Florence, the French-Brazilian painter and inventor who traveled with Baron von Langsdorff into the jungles of Brazil's Mato Grosso in the late 1820s. The opera follows the journey of these two men as they venture into the Amazon, where they are confronted by two anaconda snakes, who are water gods. Seduced by the anacondas, Langsdorff loses his mind, infected by fever. From the detailed journals that Hércules kept, we see that he completed his first experiments fixing images with a camera obscura, coining the term "photo-graphia" (painting with light). Oloixarac developed this story as a research assistant to the Department of Romance Languages at the Harvard libraries, and this past February completed her research and libretto at Stanford University. The cast features baritone Alejandro Spies in one of the leading roles (Watch his 2013 ISATC debut at Americas Society here).
The majority of the libretto is in Portuguese, with several German lieder, sung by Langsdorff, as well as some passages in Quechua, sung by the anacondas. The work is scored for two pianos, four singers, and electronics.
Watch a video preview of the work, with mini interviews with the composer, librettist, and set designer, from the CETC.
Music of the Americas: How did the inclusion of Quechua come up in your research? Is it connected to Amazon legends of these water gods?
Pola Oloixarac: Monsters, and the monstrous, are important categories in Brazilian culture—from the classic Macunaíma by Mário de Andrade, to legends and architectural brutalism. The Anacondas, our goddesses of the rivers, speak mostly Quechua, and some Portuguese. They speak backwards too.
Water deities play an overpowering role in Amazonian legends. The Runa Simi, or Quechua, has been an underground system for centuries, spanning across Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and parts of Amazonian Brazil. Runa Simi means the language of the people. They were not allowed to speak it—it was frowned upon by the “civilized,” yet it survived the Spanish and the Portuguese waves. Other languages are spoken in the Brazilian forests too, but the available grammars are too few. There’s a special beauty to Runa Simi. Many sounds are borrowed from nature, with words imitating, for example, the clash of water and matter. And its syntax is in fact much closer to Latin and Germanic tongues than to the modern Romance languages, which makes for a much more technical, clinical language.
Music of the Americas: Is there a conflict between the characters, in respect to language? Does the Baron understand what is being communicated to him by the snakes only in his dream-fever?
Oloixarac: The Baron speaks in Portuguese with Hercules, but sometimes his mind elopes, and he bursts into his Muttersprache, German. There’s a small cycle of German lieder inside the opera, the Baron’s little Winterreise in the jungle. He’s losing his mind and has epiphanies of a world that can’t be seen. So yes, I think in a way he understands what the Anacondas are singing, and that’s why he goes mad.
Music of the Americas: How has the collaboration developed? Did your research come first, then the art, then the music, or everything together?
Oloixarac: I stumbled upon the diaries and inventions of Hercules Florence when I was in Boston researching a novel on explorers in Brazil. My native instinct was to make Hercules into a novel, but I struggled, I couldn’t find the language for it. Then I realized that opera was the language Hercules was asking for, and, when I returned to Buenos Aires, I called my friend the composer Esteban Insinger. We started working on the opera immediately.
We were lucky to have Miguel Galperín’s trust, voice and ear from early on. Making the opera site–specific for the CETC at the Teatro Colón was an inspiration in itself. How to conjure a Mato Grosso out of this blackness? We were fascinated by Luna Paiva’s luscious jungle dioramas, so we invited her to do the scenography. And we invited Walter Jakob to do the régie. Walter has a great taste for humor, he’s awfully melomaniac (he owns over 2500 vinyl records), so his interpretation of the musical libretto is very joyous.
Music of the Americas: What do the sets look like so far? Are there sketches?
Oloixarac: We have beautiful gouaches by Luna Paiva revisiting the species painted by Hércules Florence.
Savage Theories
Diego Bdez
113.7 (Dec. 1, 2016): p26.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Savage Theories.
By Pola Oloixarac. Tr. by Roy Kesey.
Jan. 2017. 304p. Soho, $25 (9781616957353).
In this dazzling, frantic tour de force, Argentine author Oloixarac traces several intertwining threads. Rosa Ostreech distracts herself from completing her convoluted thesis by attempting to seduce an aging professor. Portly Kamtchowsky and her lover, Pabst, engage in pornographic high jinks, and a Dutch anthropologist works on a theory about human evolution rooted in the predatory practices of our primate ancestors. Oloixarac's suspiciously cagey narrator, sounding like an aggressively witty intellectual, and who has no problem divulging explicit sexual details, doesn't so much weave together as assemble into a pastiche these competing story lines. She also manages to resurrect ghosts from Argentina's Dirty War and dive headfirst into the twenty-first century's strange technological frontier. Though the novel is daunting in substance and structure, with a wide range of cultural references from Aristotle and Leibniz to Elton John and Jenna Jameson, readers willing to indulge this careening carousel of a novel will be rewarded with an unexpectedly prescient experience. In spite of its first publication in Spanish in 2008, Oloixarac's tale proves timely in light of Argentina's recurrent political turnover.--Diego Bdez
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bdez, Diego. "Savage Theories." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 26. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474717866&it=r&asid=d33135988bc10f2242d1e73391df83b2. Accessed 3 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A474717866
Oloixarac, Pola. Savage Theories
Lawrence Olszewski
141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p87.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Oloixarac, Pola. Savage Theories. Soho. Jan. 2017. 304p. tr. From Spanish by Roy Kesey. ISBN 9781616957353. $25; ebk. ISBN 9781616957360. F
In her black comedy pastiche, Argentine essayist and journalist Oloixarac develops two story lines. In the first, Kamtchowsky and Pabst, a pair of unattractive young adults involved in drugs, orgies, and social media, develop a video game with the help of some geeky friends that hacks Google Earth. In the second thread, which develops the theme of intergenerational conflict, the pseudonymous narrator stalks a University of Buenos Aires professor whose incredible anthropological theory she aims to correct. Overlaying the minimalist plots and characters are digressions on anthropology and political philosophy in a text saturated with polysyllabic phrasing and distracting references to popular music, movies, television and social media. The translator footnoted 15 of the most obscure ones (mostly those referring to Argentine culture), but numerous others will pass by many readers as they question their purpose. Ultimately, Oloixarac's intentional pretentiousness satirizes the academic research community, with the "savage theories" of the title becoming manifest in various ways as objects of prey turn into predators. VERDICT Though the inclusion of blogs, video games, and viral videos into mainstream literature is appealing, it's not enough to offset the recondite style and pseudointellectual pose.--Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH
Olszewski, Lawrence
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Olszewski, Lawrence. "Oloixarac, Pola. Savage Theories." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 87. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371183&it=r&asid=1fb7c27755c2d55970465122317c6043. Accessed 3 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472371183
Savage Theories
263.44 (Oct. 31, 2016): p51.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Savage Theories
Pola Oloixarac, trans. from the Spanish by Roy Kesey. Soho, $25 (304p) ISBN 978-1-61695-735-3
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Acclaimed in Argentina when it was first released, Oloixarac's brilliant, dextrous debut novel is a twisty tale of academia, lust, and culture. At its core are three narratives, two of which take place in the present: the adventures of young Kamtchowsky and her boyfriend, Pabst, as they sift their way through the Buenos Aires music, drug, pornography, and video game scenes; and the pursuit of the novel's narrator, known only as Rosa Ostreech, as she tries to draw the attention of her older professor (by seducing another man), also in Buenos Aires. The third story line begins in 1917 and focuses on a Dutch anthropologist--and later his disciples--as he explores a theory that ties human civilization and behavior to the violence seen in our primate ancestors. These ambitious narrative threads overlap, yet characters disappear for long stretches, making their stories unfold in fits and starts, which may frustrate some. However, the author's ability to incorporate diverse elements, including 1970s Argentinian sex comedies, early 20th-century psychological theory, Elton John, and Thomas Hobbes singing in bed, makes for a singular and humorous experience. Perhaps best of all is Oloixarac's prose: discursive, surprising, and off-kilter--like the characters themselves, it reveals a ceaseless appetite for understanding and belonging. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Savage Theories." Publishers Weekly, 31 Oct. 2016, p. 51. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470462498&it=r&asid=eea22ffc8c03cb312669062e49ac78a1. Accessed 3 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470462498
Pola Oloixarac, Roy Kesey: SAVAGE THEORIES
(Oct. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Pola Oloixarac, Roy Kesey SAVAGE THEORIES Soho (Adult Fiction) 25.00 ISBN: 978-1-61695-735-3
Set in Buenos Aires, Oloixarac's debut novel ranges widely, from initiation rites to computer hacking, from human prehistory to ketamine-fueled parties.The mysterious narrator stalks a middle-aged professor, desperate to reveal that she alone understands his brilliant Theory of Egoic Transmissions ("soon I will illuminate the dark side of your philosophy"). Parallel to this narrative runs a sexual picaresque, beginning "amid the violence of the Years of Lead, in the late 1970s." The heroine of this thread, Kamtchowsky, and her boyfriend, Pabst, become involved with another couple. Dark and humorous in turns, the tone is wry, erudite, raunchy, and the text is sprinkled with references to politics, philosophy, anthropology, and pop culture and the occasional illustration. Academic posturing is mocked. A character finds himself "caught in a burst of metatheory as regarded the meaning of jerking himself off." At the heart of Oloixarac's ambitious book lie the human relationship to violence and the significance of our prehistoric shift from prey to weapon-wielding predator. The narrator is interested in "an ontology of human acts," "an anthropology of voluptuousness and war." She sees the individual existing within "a space dense with ghosts and purposeful geometries" where "the totality of past and present points of view...pierce through space, and one another." This could also describe the structure of the novel, making for a sometimes-dizzying ride. The narrator embarks on a calculated seduction of a former leftist guerilla and toys with him, the prey becoming predator. Meanwhile, Kamtchowsky, "little diva of amateur porn," invents a computer game based on Argentina's Dirty War. A hack embedded within it makes possible a project that maps Buenos Aires in a wholly new way ("The city was an utter mess. And yet it was beautiful"), illuminating "the cyclical history of a country where events occurred and then revolved around one another, merely existing, unable to account for themselves." While there are echoes of Borges and Bolano here, the synthesis of ideas and the manic intelligence are wholly new. Brilliant, original, and very fun to read.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Pola Oloixarac, Roy Kesey: SAVAGE THEORIES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466551587&it=r&asid=508139cfcf404b17be6a3187135a1d7e. Accessed 3 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466551587
from the January 2017 issue
“Savage Theories” by Pola Oloixarac
Reviewed by David Varno
Image of “Savage Theories” by Pola Oloixarac
Translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey
Soho Press, 2017
Of the many savage theories thrown around by the characters who enliven Pola Oloixarac’s transgressive novel of revolution, desire, and academia, one of the most devastating is delivered by the narrator:
The Spanish word for mirror, espejo, shares a root with the word species; the mirror shows each species for what it is, and lays bare the shoddy reasoning that has led each to think itself unique.
The perversions of language is one of Oloixarac’s central themes, and this, along with the nuanced references to Argentina’s Dirty War and the country’s political history following Peronism, plus the characters’ tenuous interpretations of various philosophers expressed in murky academic syntax, must have made the book particularly challenging to translate. Roy Kesey succeeded in creating a text that is immersive, multilayered, sensual, and cerebral, and it captures Oloixarac’s wicked brand of humor, which often triggers bark-like laughs followed by pangs of guilt.
Throughout the book, Oloixarac presents scathing criticisms of the belief in one’s individuality, as performed or clung to in three main activities: online interaction, hooking up at parties, and psychoanalysis. As young academics and artists, her central characters vacillate between attempting to disprove the fiction of individuality and falling victim to it, due to an oversupply of both self-awareness and narcissism. These opposing drives toward self-erasure and the desire for recognition often trigger the action of the novel, and they yield a series of sexual adventures rendered with frank details that are variously thrilling and disturbing.
There is a nightclub bathroom scene with Kamtchowsky, involving a ketamine-induced paralysis and two men she names Beanie and Curls, of whom Kamtchowsky thinks, "They are like bears, and I am the honey.” There is an impromptu roadside tryst between a man named Andy and a transexual woman, during which Andy’s companion, Kamtchowsky’s boyfriend Pabst, unhappily masturbates while the other two have sex. Kamtchowsky and Pabst also share many orgies with Andy and his girlfriend Mara, a photographer whose work transforms the landscape of Buenos Aires, where they live, into a vision of post-apocalyptic destruction. Mara’s themes later come into play in a collaborative project conceived by Kamtchowsky, a filmmaker who explores the intersections between autobiography and her country’s revolutions while living a somewhat wilder life than the narrator, Rosa—an academic who spends much of her time at home with her pet fish Yorick and her cat Montaigne.
Savage Theories compels with its energetic, spleen-filled characters, and the seamless blend of desire and theorizing is contagious on both fronts, but the book is a difficult read. There are many digressions and red herrings. It takes time to get one’s bearings and identify the themes and action that are at work under the surface and eventually tie everything together. The effect is destabilizing, and prevents the reader from sharing a knowing smirk with Rosa when she lands a sharp linguistic barb. We are implicated along with everyone else, which I believe is Oloixarac’s intention, and the effect deepens the experience of her novel.
The book opens with a synopsis of an Orokavian rite of passage called the Cult of the Wolf, in which children are traumatized in order to confront their deepest fears. This is juxtaposed with a brief introduction of Kamtchowsky, followed by the life stories of her parents. The narrator emphasizes the role of psychology in Kamtchowsky's upbringing. When her parents met, her mother was studying the subject and psychoanalysis had entered the culture as "a sort of linguistic vanguard [that] had managed to insert [itself] into the moist cavities of the middle class." The reasons for presenting aboriginal initiation rituals and the history of modern psychoanalysis in Argentina are unclear until we understand the book's premise. At this point, we have no choice but to surrender to the next character introduction, a man of Kamtchowsky's parents' age named Augusto García Roxler, whose interest in pursuing a Theory of Egoic Transmissions is cause for another jump.
Roxler's theory originates with a Bolaño-esque anthropologist named Johan van Vliet, who performed a series of experiments on people in remote West Africa. Van Vliet’s disciples are reminiscent of the cult of Archimboldi from the first part of 2666, in terms of their devotion to an author who has disappeared from the world, although in this case we find them attempting to publish his work rather than uncover his hiding place. As the quest of the disciples mirrors the narrator’s own efforts to improve on García Roxler’s theory for her own glory and recognition, we begin to understand the significance of the backstory, as well as the anthropological passages.
Rosa is obsessed with García Roxler, and has become one of those people who take a professor’s class over and over and over again, though her crush is based on more than infatuation. She needs one of her university’s old, washed-up “pictures of Dorian Gray” to acknowledge her existence, and she believes she has something to contribute. We are fifty pages into the book before we first see her, arriving at an embassy reception to confront the professor. She is pulsing with purpose and “emotion has given a rosy tint to her cheeks.” The scene is rendered in a tone of satire, which Rosa overplays in order to contain her spiking self-consciousness, going so far as to liken herself to “a débutante from imperial Russia, [blinking] delicately at the…world her glaucous feet do not yet dare to enter.”
The secret action of Savage Theories, hidden behind the antics of Rosa’s alter-ego Kamtchowsky, is her re-writing of García Roxler’s work, but the book is most engaging when Oloixarac crosses the line from Rosa's formal language of critical theory to the third-person dramatization of theorizing. Amidst the rich emotional interplay and battle scars racked up between lovers Kamtchowsky, Pabst, Mara, and Andy, theorizing is practiced to explore desire as well as to construct lines of defense. Near the end of the book, their collaboration culminates in a subversive plot that involves a video game modeled after the Dirty War and a cyber attack on Google Earth that appears in the form of political theatre and functions as art. Kamtchowsky’s story ends triumphantly, and her fearless rebellion seems to strengthen Rosa’s conviction in the importance of her own work. Kamtchowsky’s example is equally empowering to the reader, in a time when rebellion and personal freedom have become coopted to promote hate and apathy.
When Theory and Fiction Collide: Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac
Reviewed By Steven Felicelli
June 8th, 2017
Theory and fiction have a history. They’d been flirting with each other for centuries and now regularly engage in textual intercourse. Creative theorists cite Kafka and Borges as often as Kant or Freud and there is a new breed of author more likely to be influenced by Jean Baudrillard or bell hooks than Raymond Carver or Alice Munro.
Pola Oloixarac is a case in point. Having studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, she is currently working on her PhD at Stanford (the third philosophy student novelist I’ve reviewed this year). Her debut novel, Savage Theories, is the story of a city and a species, incarnated by its theorist-practitioners. Heroically translated by Roy Kesey, Oloixarac’s word-playful narrative reinterprets the origin of species, tracking the evolution of violence from early hominids to the “disappeared” of Argentina’s Dirty War.
Though there are echoes of Bolaño (beyond the titular Salvajes) and Clarice Lispector (“thoughtways of cockroaches”), contemporary comparatives (Valeria Luiselli, Mark de Silva, Yanigahara’s The People in the Trees), as well as philosophical forerunners (Hegel, Badiou, Deleuze), Pola Oloixarac’s Savage Theories blazes its own trail through human history. Her multi-disciplinary, synchronic, panoptic vision of humanity aims at no less than an evolutionary theory of everything. Her characters are drawn from real and invented histories, collaborating in a semi-fictional milieu where the living and the dead (flesh and text) coordinate in moving the plot. Together, these figures form a kind of Hegelian Idea moving toward its realization, while individually, each is a potential subject (à la Badiou) at the hinge of history.
I stood like the I that rises up at the beginning of a sentence, on the verge of throwing itself upon a verb and an object, of ruling over them, possessing them… in control of events.
The direction of the novel is driven by fictional anthropologist Johan van Vliet’s Theory of Egoic Transmissions and his various disciples’ endeavor to promote, differentiate, and embody this idea. The latter undertaken by a gradually emerging narrator, the pseudonymous Rosa Ostreech. Rosa wants to demonstrate van Vliet’s theory by provoking an unsuspecting subject, the lecherous dissident Collazo.
Meanwhile, an unabashedly ugly couple, Kamtchowski and Pabst, (ugliness deemed Darwinian as it necessitates resourcefulness) parallel the narrator’s experimentation by swinging with the ideally attractive Andy and Mara. The foursome ventures into the underground nightlife of Buenos Aires where ketamine and casual sex are common denominators. In an emblematic encounter, Andy is fellated by a transgender woman, ejaculating just as Pabst (looking on) begins to vomit. This is an ambivalent, eruptive novel.
In addition to these libidinous intellectuals, there are two inherent protagonists: Buenos Aires and homo habilis. The latter, according to van Vliet and his disciples, is the species that evolved into human beings as we know them today. This hominid’s mastery of tools, weapons, etc. signaled the end of its long run as a cowering, fleeing, hunted animal.
…the persecution of the earliest hominids lived on, carved in the depths of the species; it had influenced the evolution of the human brain, and thus the organization of culture as a celebration of the passage from prey to predator.
As brutal rites of passage and perpetual war between tribes defined our species for millennia (beggaring our relatively recent reign at the top of the food chain), it is dread, not desire, that motivates human action. Or so van Vliet’s theory goes. This grand theory reinterprets the 20th century in general, and Buenos Aires in particular.
Argentina’s recent history of dissidence and disappearance has clearly inspired Oloixarac’s tale. The country’s unique mélange of left and right under the banner of Perón, its sectarian violence and fierce repression, its amnesty and recrimination, its implicating of everyone from the French and American governments to the PLO and Che Guevara, is best summed up by Argentine President, Carlos Menem’s 1989 declaration, “We come from long and cruel confrontations”.
Oloixarac’s theorist-protagonists are not content to interpret this cruel world, however, as the point is to change it. (Specters of Marx haunt the novel’s sexual, political and academic battlefields.) Enter Q, a gamer tech who spearheads the group’s online video game project, Dirty War 1975. This venture involves hacking Google Earth in order to produce a user-generated, spatiotemporal map of Buenos Aires where the multifarious layers of history are superimposed. Therein, one can see everything from the home of a Borges character to “the assault vehicles parked in the Plaza de Mayo” to “the geological strata of the region’s speech patterns,” all of it engendered by the aforementioned dread.
Facts, details, architecture, catastrophe, chaos, it all returned to write itself once more into the spatial history of repercussion.
The picture of modernity presented here is less of will-to-power at cross-purposes than of myriad egos wrestling themselves into mutually inclusive contortions.
The semi-fictional world these egos inhabit (of Rosa Ostreech and Juan Perón, van Vliet and the West African Fon, Borges and “Carlos Argentino Daneri”) is a byproduct of egoic transmission. In this hybrid reality, we begin to see individuals (egos) as phases, forces that interact, vectors intersecting to trigger the explosive events of history. Each person acts in concert with all others like organs in a body or words in a sentence, each being the signifier in a societal syntax.
…it’s plausible that the irresistible instinct to act en masse, to replicate the irresistible circuit of empathy, constitutes a sort of private language for our species, one that is older than any spoken language, its source residing deep below the conscious mind. The phenomena of synchrony and contagion may yield only a single visible detail in a vast and complex field of study.
Vast and complex field of study, indeed. Anthropology, philosophy, history, linguistics, psychology, pornography, et al.; nothing escapes the conceptual slash-and-burn as it readies each field for a new yield. The groundwork laid for a body politic that has absorbed its subjects and foreclosed “the fiction of individuality”.
CAN’T YOU SEE THAT PEOPLE AND PERSONALITIES ARE ONLY FALLACIES?… YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN AN ORGAN, AN ORGAN INSIDE A PURE SENTENCE, AN ORGANIZATIONAL CHART…THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE HYMN THAT SPEAKS WITHIN YOU
Savage Theories presents a deep-focus tableau wherein theory and praxis, subject and object, past and present share a single stage in an ongoing, immemorial drama. Its kaleidoscopic vision of a densely layered life-world (Lebenswelt) illuminates the sheer scope of existence. At times the tone strays into a superficial pop sensibility, but Oloixarac’s creative force is ferocious, comprehensive, tidal. Her debut novel formulates one of the most thoroughgoing theories of the way we live now.