Pola Oloixarac

Argentinian writer Pola Oloixarac in conversation about her first novel translated into English, Savage Theories.

Praise for Savage Theories:

“A stunning vibrant maximalist whirlwind of a novel. Oloixarac’s wit and ambition are evident on every page. By comparison, most other contemporary fiction seems a little dull and simple-minded.” — Hari Kunzru, author of Gods Without Men

“Monstrously clever and terribly funny. More than a debut, this book is one many of us would spend our lives trying to write. ” — Javier Calvo

“Pola Oloixarac’s prose is the great event of the new Argentinian narrative. Her novel is unforgettable, philosophical and very serene.” — Ricardo Piglia

About Savage Theories:

A novel of seduction and madness, hate and love, set in the world of Argentinean academia and animated by the spirits of Wittgenstein, Rousseau, Nabokov and Bolano.
Rosa Ostreech, a pseudonym for the novel’s beautiful but self-conscious narrator, carries around a trilingual edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, struggles with her thesis on violence and culture, sleepswith a bourgeois former guerrilla, and pursues her elderly professor with a highly charged blend oferoticism and desperation. Elsewhere on campus, Pabst and Kamtchowsky tour the underground scene of Buenos Aires, dabbling in ketamine, sex, video games, and hacking. And in Africa in 1917, a Dutch anthropologist named Johan van Vliet begins work on a theory that explains human consciousness and civilization by reference to our early primate ancestors animals, who, in the process of becominghuman, spent thousands of years as prey.
Savage Theories wryly explores fear and violence, war and sex, eroticism and philosophy. Its complex and flawed characters grapple with a mess of impossible, visionary theories, searching for their place in our fragmented digital world.