Savage Theories
Pola Oloixarac
ISBN: 9781616957353
Published: January, 2017
Pricing
Paperback $16.00
More books by Pola Oloixarac
Description
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, sleeps with a bourgeois former guerrilla, and pursues her elderly professor with a highly charged blend of eroticism and desperation. Elsew...
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, sleeps with a bourgeois former guerrilla, and pursues her elderly professor with a highly charged blend of eroticism and desperation. Elsewhere on campus, Pabst and Kamtchowsky tour the underground scene of Buenos Aires, dabbling in ketamine, group 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 becoming human, spent thousands of years as prey.
Media
“A Boston Globe Best Book of 2017. ”
“Pola Oloixarac’s prose is the great event of the new Argentinian narrative. Her novel is unforgettable, philosophical and very serene.”
—Ricardo Piglia, author of Artificial Respiration
“A prodigious, masterful novel.”
—Le Figaro
“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, author of Wonderful World
“A provocative, brave, controversial novel.”
—Vicente Luis Mora, author of Pangea: Internet, Blogs and Communication in a New World
“While there are echoes of Borges and Bolaño here, the synthesis of ideas and the manic intelligence are wholly new. Brilliant, original, and very fun to read.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review on Savage Theories
“Oloixarac's brilliant, dextrous, debut novel, is a twisty tale of academia, lust, and culture. 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 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.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review on Savage Theories
“In this dazzling, frantic tour de force, Argentine author Oloixarac traces several intertwining threads. She also manages to resurrect ghosts from Argentina’s Dirty War and dive headfirst into the twenty-first century’s strange technological frontier...readers willing to indulge this careening carousel of a novel will be rewarded with an unexpectedly prescient experience. ”
—Booklist on Savage Theories
“Satirizes the academic research community.”
—Library Journal
“A radical, bitingly funny debut novel offers a veritable hurricane of ideas on topics from technology to anthropology and features parallel arcs, one involving a student obsessed with her professor and the other about a couple cruising the Buenos Aires underground.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine on Savage Theories
“[A] transgressive novel of revolution, desire, and academia... Savage Theories compels with its energetic characters, and the seamless blend of desire and theorizing is contagious on both fronts.”
—Words Without Borders
“San Francisco’s Pola Oloixarac, named one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish Novelists, takes the reader on a surreal journey through her native Argentina in Savage Theories.”
—The Mercury News
“[An] exuberant blend of political satire and sexual picaresque. This book rewards total immersion: Come for the inevitable Borges allusions, stay for the wild ride.”
—New York Times Book Review on Savage Theories
“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 illuminates the sheer scope of existence. Oloixarac’s creative force is ferocious, comprehensive, tidal. Her debut novel formulates one of the most thoroughgoing theories of the way we live now.”
—The Rumpus
“This debut novel announces a huge, rambunctious talent, with its hilarious and ribald glimpse of intellectual and sexual politics in a post-post revolutionary Argentina.”
—Boston Globe
“Savage Theories is a novel of ideas, exploring the violent nature of humans...this is the type of book you read when you want great writing and to learn something about the world.”