Bad air days: Savage Theories, by Pola Oloixarac, reviewed

According to a 2016 report published by the World Health Organisation, Argentina is the ‘therapy capital of the world’, boasting 222 psychologists per 100,000 people. Reading the Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac’s Savage Theories, I can understand why.

The novel follows three characters, each more bizarre and beguiling than the last. First we have our narrator, Rosa. She is a philosophy student at the University of Buenos Aires who becomes obsessed with, and attempts to seduce, her elderly professor Augusto Garcia Roxler, whose ‘Theory of Egoic Transmissions’ charts man’s evolution from prey to predator. Yet Rosa also finds herself drawn to Collazo, a former guerrilla and veteran of the Dirty War of the 1970s. The idealism of these one-time revolutionaries and their acolytes is ridiculed, however, in the diary of Rosa’s ‘disappeared’ aunt, which consists not of her vision for a socialist Argentina but rather a series of musings on unrequited love addressed to Chairman Mao.

Next we have another student, Kamtchowsky, and her boyfriend Pabst, who find themselves immersed in seemingly disparate worlds. One is the drug-and group-sex-filled underground of nocturnal Buenos Aires (a particularly memorable scene involves Kamtchowsky, captured in a club toilet in ketamine-induced catatonia, unknowingly – though to her eventual delight – becoming the star of a gonzo porn film). The second is the world of online gamers and hackers. Finally, in snippets of text set in Africa in 1917, we follow a Dutch anthropologist at work on a theory of self-reflexiveness that will eventually become the Theory of Egoic Transmissions.

Published while Oloixarac was completing her doctoral studies at Stanford University, the novel is quick to mock the posturing and pretence of the academic world, especially that of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, of which Oloixarac is an alumna.