No sacred cows

The Argentine novelist, journalist and librettist Pola Oloixarac pulls no punches. (Unimpressed by Han Kang’s recent Nobel prize, she condemned the new laureate as a “middle-brow author” who writes in “basic” prose.) In Mona (2022), Oloixarac, who pursued graduate studies in the US and is now based in Barcelona, lampooned identity politics in the literary world. Her latest book in Spanish, Bad Hombre (2024), is a polemic challenging “the tyranny of political correctness” and #MeToo.

No cow is sacred for the author – not even the Dirty War in Argentina, during which suspected left-wing opponents were “disappeared” by the military dictatorship. While other novelists who were children under the junta, such as Mariana Enríquez, harness horror to convey the collective trauma, Oloixarac wields humour. Comedy, she believes, allows us to “move deeper into the dark”.

Sharply satirical, with echoes of Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño, Savage Theories (Las teorías salvajes, 2008) sends up left-wing politics and academia (“the lettered elite who actually took all this nonsense seriously”). The controversial novel was a bestseller across the Spanish-speaking world. Roy Kesey’s English translation was published in the US in 2017 and now appears in the UK. (It follows Kesey’s translation of the cyberpunk novel Las constelaciones oscuras, 2015 – Dark Constellations, 2019 – and Adam Morris’s rendering of Mona.)

Set primarily in Buenos Aires in the 1990s, Savage Theories is narrated by the pseudonymous Rosa Ostreech, a student writing her thesis on violence and culture. She stalks her middle-aged professor, Augusto García Roxler, whom only she believes to be a genius. Inspired by a fictitious Dutch anthropologist, Johan van Vliet, whose story is told in flashback, Roxler posits that violence is an innate human trait, a legacy of our bestial origins. Unsuccessful in her pursuit of the professor, Rosa toys with a former leftist guerrilla, flipping the script of predation.

A parallel story line concerns a young documentary film-maker called Kamtchowsky and her blogger boyfriend, Pablo (“Pabst”). Kamtchowsky’s mother enlists her to type up the notebooks of her aunt Vivi, a leftist activist who was kidnapped during the junta years while handing out pamphlets at a factory. Oloixarac treats Vivi’s story irreverently: the diaries, addressed in code to Mao Zedong, are filled with her attempts to square her sexual jealousy of her boyfriend with her Marxist ideals about the abolition of private property. Kamtchowsky, meanwhile, is “willing to admit that the whole armed rebellion thing had pumped the ’70s full of sexual energy, but actual sexual follow-through … hadn’t exactly been its strong point”, despite “its well established petites mortes, or petites mortes en masse”.

Amid much philosophizing, Kamtchowsky and Pabst engage in group sex (sometimes of dubious morality), amateur porn, ketamine and hacking. Collaborating with a pair of fellow swingers, Andy and Mara, they enlist a hacker to create an “adventure-style” video game called “Dirty War 1975”, which proves “extremely popular”. The game involves redirecting Google Earth to reveal the history of the country, showing sites and scenes including slaughterhouses, electrocuted children, pandemics, fires, riots and orgies. The public is invited to contribute “by sending in digitally altered jpegs of their favorite street corners and neighborhoods”. Buenos Aires “was an utter mess”, Oloixarac writes. “And yet it was beautiful.”

As in Borges, maps, mirrors and time are recurring themes in Oloixarac’s work: Dark Constellations, which the author has described as a “bildungsroman of the internet”, also ends with a hack, of a global surveillance system using genetic mapping. The Google Earth project brings to mind Borges’s iconic story featuring a 1:1 map. The overlapping epochs of “Dirty War 1975” challenge the idea of a timeline of cause and effect: “This was the raw dough, the cyclical history of a country where events occurred and then revolved around one another, merely existing, unable to account for themselves”.

A unique mixture of the carnal and cerebral, and teeming with diverting references, Savage Theories is more fun than daunting, with the exception of a superfluous digression to Van Vliet’s early-twentieth-century research in West Africa. With its contemporary themes, Mona is perhaps more accessible, but this earlier novel recalls Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. While perhaps richer for those well versed in the relevant politics, both are nonetheless a wild ride for those who are not. And as the slogan of the Google Earth project has it (challenging Tolstoy): “Painting your village of course isn’t painting the world, but at least you’ll be painting your village”.

Mia Levitin is a cultural and literary critic based in London

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