Savage Theories [Paperback]

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 ofWhite Tearsand Gods Without Men

A debut novel of seduction and madness, hate and love, set in the world of Argentine academia and animated by the spirits of Wittgenstein, Rousseau, Nabokov and Bolaño

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.

Savage Theorieswryly 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.Praise for Pola Oloixarac

“What constitutes the originality of Oloixarac’s work is her representation of daily life, with a richness and color only hinted at by either Borges or Baudrillard. Her novels do more than allegorize the pursuit of knowledge or theorize the ontological status of the real in an age of unreality. Her multifaceted characters show something of what it’s like to inhabit a fleshy body in a world awash in representations—whilS6