Mona, the third novel from Pola Oloixarac, casts a cynical gaze over the literary world – with mixed results. It follows the story of the eponymous protagonist, a young Peruvian writer struggling with Second Book Syndrome, as she travels from California to Stockholm to take part in a writers’ conference. All the while, she waits to find out whether she has won a prestigious European literary award.
Mona gets off to a swaggering start. Its first 50 pages are as sharp as anything Oloixarac has written, but things go awry in Stockholm. The writers’ conference proves to be a lot less interesting than the build-up to it, the satire forgets to be funny, and a surreal subplot only serves to muddy the already sludgy narrative waters. As the plot becomes less assured, the writing loses its bite, becoming functional rather than acerbic, and sometimes resorting to cliché.
Mona is a disillusioned character in a similar vein to the unnamed narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, but whereas that novel built to a logical, seemingly inevitable conclusion, Mona runs out of ideas long before its end. It is a short novel that could, and probably should, have been shorter.
Mona, Pola Oloixarac (Serpent’s Tail)
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words JOSHUA REES