Mona by Pola Oloixarac

The Swedish summer light covered everything like a soft layer of dust, white material that made it look like it had just rained chalk. It was so cruel that darkness wouldn't start to fall until close to midnight. The day would remain in this pale limbo for interminable hours. It was a writers' purgatory, the white page as breathing air, where everyone was just waiting around to see who'd receive the key to paradise. How long do bruises last on the body?

Mona, a Peruvian-Argentinian writer who has recently published an acclaimed debut, has been nominated for the prestigious Basske-Wortz Prize. She's been invited to a remote compound in Sweden where she and a couple dozen other writers from around the world will hobnob and gossip, and at the end of the week, the prize will be announced. Mona thinks she stands a chance, but maybe not as much as the mercurial Icelandic poet Ragnar, or the smug French writer Philippe. But she may not last through the week, as she seems to be falling apart: mysterious bruises, whose source she cannot remember, have appeared all over her body. 

On her phone, Mona reads about the disappearance of a young Argentine girl named Sandrita. Speculation flies about the disappearance, until, towards the end of the week, Sandrita turns up dead and raped on a beach. The reader is asked to see a parallel between Mona and Sandrita, perhaps even wonder if the mysterious bruises that have appeared on Mona's body represent a kind of mystical kinship with Sandrita. And yet, Mona is many thousands of miles away; the writer's conference could not be further than the reality of Sandrita's short life if it were on the moon. The writers who get up to speak about the political in their writing end up sounding proud and ridiculous, as with the Middle Eastern writer who claims, "I will be your voice" to the voiceless of the world, or the reactionary jerk who says things like, "Our Virgin Mary is Che Guevara." And perhaps that's the point--all this talk about the significance of writing is divorced from the world it's meant to represent. "It's not that there are no more literary personalities in our era," Mona tells another writer, "it's just that now they come to places like these thinking they're writers and end up leaving as characters. The festivals are the real novels!" But if so, they're novels that speak to no one but the characters themselves.

Man, I couldn't figure this book out. How seriously am I supposed to take the Virgin Mary-Che stuff? It's too shallow to be serious, but not funny enough to be satirical, I thought. Mona is a talky novel, in which Mona engages in short conversations with her fellow writers, and in which they say things that are inscrutable, shallow, or both, and in language that no one--not even writers--drops into in the very first moments of meeting someone. How seriously am I supposed to take this, for example:

And there's nothing as womanly as incarnation. To be a woman and write is to be trans. That's why writing is trans, being fat is trans, and this whole performance of being a woman is the most trans thing in the world. Ever since Tiresias, who of course was the first trans person ever.

It's hard to write a book about writing; it's a tall order for anyone, I think. But Mona isn't a book about writing; the act of writing barely enters into it. What Mona writes about, or what her writing sounds like, we'll never know, just as we don't know anything, really, about the writing of Marco or Akto or Shingzwe or Chrystos, or whoever. But the writers themselves aren't interesting without their writing, which ought to animate this whole farce. If the thesis of the book is that writing is divorced from the world--and I think that's meeting it a little more than halfway--Mona manages to be both divorced from the world and divorced from the writing. What's left is a series of tedious conversations. Mona wants to satirize those writer's conference, but it fails because it's too convinced that the conferences themselves are inherently interesting.

Mona is a book where nothing happens, until it does: first, Mona remembers at last that her bruises are the result of a rape by Antonio, the lover whose texts she's been ignoring all week. Second, the mysterious Icelandic poet finally gets up to speak, and in doing so--spoiler alert--summons a mythical Norse serpent from the compound lake. It's a symbol, I guess, of the real--power, death, violence--intruding upon the masturbatory writers who have ignored it, despite their pretenses. As an ending to the book it feels cheap and strange.