... engaging and challenging ... Oloixarac jumps into this saturnine literary tradition and adds to it an eccentric, intersectional feminist despair ... the reader is alerted to the fact that Oloixarac is abandoning any ambition to deliver an easily agreeable protagonist, an interesting goal in an age where relatability is the coin of the literary realm — though if one happens to be Latinx and/or someone who has experienced an 'evident defect,' they might find these flip accounts of their identity cringeworthy before the first chapter has ended. Nevertheless, press onward: even if the book will supply a yet richer hoard of insults, Oloixarac offers an illuminating critique of the business of literature .... The ending, and Oloixarac’s solution, is not entirely satisfactory ... What Oloixarac calls for is a heady counteroffensive against 'death,' which I stand by: writing as a commitment to people and some version of love, without descending into pabulum or cliché. Though Oloixarac herself appears skeptical or even nihilistic about the possibility of a contemporary literary culture that practices the humanistic values it often preaches, particularly when it comes to women writers of color, it bears noting that such a world does exist — you just have to look for it ... Mona’s message is often difficult to discern amid the emotive blankness and mythical creatures, but it is there, and rich, and real. We need literature that is born of a practice of recognizing others, forged in the heat of personal and emotive risk, and wrought from intimate, collective, and passionate struggle. It may be that such vaunted goals are tricky to realize within the mega-publishing houses that arise today like Ragnar’s monster, but, thankfully, there are still folks out there who love both literature and the human beings who read and write it.

Mona [...] leans wholeheartedly on crime fiction. Oloixarac is an exuberant genre-blender ... Mona reads like Rachel Cusk’s Kudos on drugs ... Mona is, for example, both resilient and hedonistic—or rather, she’s resilient through hedonism ... Mona’s theorizing could put some readers off, or make them long for Elmore Leonard’s snappy, comic crime writing ... But the novel’s headier passages nonetheless do important work, helping Mona slowly explain to herself, then accept, her complicated reactions to her rape and her vulnerability as a woman. This nuanced acceptance helps Mona succeed. So does Oloixarac’s genre-mixing, which leads to originality of thought and technique. If her novel’s abstractions are extremely literary, its acknowledgment that total safety isn’t achievable owes a debt to generations of crime fiction.

There are provocative presentations on the state of literature; erotic interludes; and drunken proclamations about the nature of art—all tied together by nothing more than Mona’s memories and desires. It ends with a truly out-of-left-field sequence and a brutally intimate revelation that doesn’t feel wholly earned by the 200 pages that precede it. Lucky, then, that Oloixarac is so damn funny and insightful that Mona is rewarding nonetheless ... This may be a structurally minor work compared with her previous novel, but Oloixarac has profound things to say, and a great many of ways of saying them.

Mona isn't particularly likable, but her character is treated with honesty and the reader's gaze is held firmly on her throughout ... toward the end of the novel...an unexpected and apocalyptic conclusion which she's been too self-absorbed to see coming. With controlled emotion that builds to a devastating ending, Mona uncovers the complexities of a post-feminist generation.

... as much as the novel delights in self-referential jabs at the state of contemporary letters (and there are many), the real rewards of this curious, compelling book lie with the mysterious Mona, and the questions that gather around her ... wary of the cultural expectation to view certain facts of an author’s identity—gender, nationality—as stand-ins for their writerly essence ... makes it clear that it, too, is implicated—its prose wriggling beneath characters’ claims about what a novel ought to be ... It would be easy for the sum of these meta-inserts to make Mona a book of artifice or brittle irony. But, fortunately, the twin hearts of the novelistic form—interiority, consciousness—at last begin to beat within our impenetrable Mona ... As an ending, it’s both entirely unexpected and not wholly warranted. But with it, the significance of Basske-Wortz, as well as the literary drama of the past few days, fades swiftly away. What remains is Mona.

Mona explodes off the page with a bravado that is self-aware yet unimpeded ... The opening chapters of Mona are a master class in developing and amplifying suspense; they also contain a vivid and intimate portrayal of a hyperactive, troubled, and alluring mind. Mona is outrageous, observant, and hilarious ... Mona is...the sort of writer who is able to keep us at arm’s length while still divulging some of the innermost parts of herself ... If the ensuing chapters of Mona disappoint then, it is no fault of the title character herself. Too much time is devoted to the close-minded fellow writers insistent on typecasting her[.]

Oloixarac has some good fun with the soft target of authors at such literary gatherings, presenting the usual variety of types and opinions. There are some amusing observations ... and the different characters, from around the world, offer quite a variety of more or less plausible literary types and acts. With reminiscences of other such literary gatherings as well, Oloixarac captures the literary circuit atmosphere reasonably well ... The literary festival comes to a spectacular surreal close...but it's not an entirely successful turn. Here Mona finally also confronts what has been weighing on—a not entirely surprising reveal, either, but certainly one that explains a lot. Oloixarac's treatment of the subject-matter—specifically, how she has had Mona handle it, until it all comes bursting out, is reasonable enough, but it is oddly situated, with the four-day countdown to the prize-giving naturally making for some distracting competitive suspense ... It all also feels a bit lazy—as do many novels in which the protagonist is frequently in a mind-altered state thanks to drugs and alcohol and mental anguish, justified or not ... an oddly and unsatisfyingly bifurcated novel.

There is plenty of this kind of spiky scepticism in the first half of this short, enjoyable and flawed novel. Provocations abound ... Insofar as she sticks to such lit-world theorising and piss-taking, Oloixarac is on steady ground. Unfortunately, having set the narrative’s wheels in motion, she has no viable plan to guide the vehicle home. The novel’s credibility collapses in the final third. A lazy appeal to Nordic mythology for unearned profundity rings jarringly false, while a gesture towards an exploration of male on female violence never follows through. Grasping for gravitas by appeal to secondhand signifiers and conscious symbolism, Oloixarac overburdens a novel that might more effectively have kept its focus on the egos and libidos of the literary set. In doing so, she falls face first into a condition with which she would be swift to diagnose her characters: pretentiousness ... It’s a shame that Mona is not both more fleshed out and tightly focused. In a literary culture swamped by clenched, worthy fiction and the writer as activist, her satirist’s misanthropy and taste for provocation are a tonic.

Oloixarac delivers a scathing indictment of the book circuit, where nobody wants to point out that the emperor has no clothes ... Even if the cynicism feels heavy-handed at times, Mona emerges as an intriguing subject, a woman who worries that the sum of her talents distills down to nothing more than her potent yet fragile sexuality.

Argentinian writer Oloixarac offers a smart, provocative take on contemporary literary culture ... While a sudden and not entirely successful swerve into fantasy makes for an abrupt ending, Mona’s spirited opining gives readers much to engage and argue with. The rich inner life of its namesake character propels this vibrant examination of the writing world.

In this third novel by Argentinian Oloixarac, an award ceremony for a major European literary prize takes an apocalyptic turn ... Savage Theories displayed the dizzying, at times manic, promise of a writer making original connections between wide-ranging subjects. This is a narrower effort and a considerably less successful one. There's a lot of material here: ideas about what it means to write, about politics and South American literature ... But there's little narrative cohesion between them ... Disappointing, because this author can do better.