野蛮理论：后革命时期阿根廷的爱情与暴力

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{"text":[[{"start":10.82,"text":"The hallowed halls of universities have long been a familiar setting in literature. "},{"start":15.049,"text":"Melding grand ideas with personal drama, writers such as Kingsley Amis, David Lodge and Donna Tartt have made use of campuses as a battleground for ideological conflicts. "}],[{"start":25.439999999999998,"text":"Savage Theories, the provocative debut from Argentine author Pola Oloixarac, (finally published in the UK for the first time in a 2017 translation by Roy Kesey after its original publication in Spanish in 2008) takes a different approach. "},{"start":39.257,"text":"Rather than focusing on individual characters and their polarised opinions, the novel enacts one sweeping thesis: that violence is inherent in human nature. "}],[{"start":48.56,"text":"Predominantly taking place in Buenos Aires in the aftermath of the Dirty War, the book’s mission is to make sense of the incomprehensible brutality of 1970s Argentina. "},{"start":57.777,"text":"It begins with an anthropological titbit about a coming-of-age ritual in New Guinea, whereby children are subjected to ordeals which some of them won’t survive, before they return dressed in their aggressor’s clothes. "}],[{"start":69.09,"text":"This is one of many such disturbing accounts at hand to argue that there is a fine line between man and beast, while the text is littered generously with references to Hobbes, Borges and Wittgenstein. "},{"start":79.507,"text":"Like her third novel Mona (a satire of the literati, published in the UK in 2022), however, Oloixarac’s project is laced with irony, also serving as a barbed takedown of the lofty world of academia. "}],[{"start":92.57000000000001,"text":"A girl, Kamtchowsky, is tasked by her mother with typing up the correspondence of her long since vanished, hardline communist aunt Vivi, a chronicling of her life pre-disappearance in the form of fanciful, never-to-be-delivered letters addressed to Chairman Mao (affectionately called “Dear Moo”). "},{"start":108.012,"text":"Years later, dabbling in documentaries, Kamtchowsky falls in with an unsavoury band of characters: the online troll Pabst, for whom spewing vitriol is a “twisted form of affection”; and the couple Mara and Andy, with whom they hook up, in between going to raves in dilapidated synagogues. "},{"start":123.51700000000001,"text":"During their sexual misadventures, the characters bathetically, flimsily invoke philosophers at wildly inappropriate moments. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"<div class=\"pic leftPic\"><picture><img src=\"https://thumbor.ftmailbox.cn/unsafe/400x0/https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/bd6f9cac-2269-43ce-a853-88f58bb4bd93.jpg\"></picture></div>"}],[{"start":131.34,"text":"A shadowy philosophy student called Rosa Ostreech unexpectedly emerges as the novel’s grandiose narrator. "},{"start":137.457,"text":"Her storyline is slightly less eventful than Kamtchowsky’s: rapt with a professor who has come up with a “Theory of Egoic Transmissions”, she sets about using her “own flesh to incarnate each part of [his] theory” — meaning seducing a former guerrilla fighter to prove that “the name of the victim coincides with that of the aggressor”. "},{"start":153.799,"text":"Meanwhile, Dutch anthropologist Johan van Vliet, on whose findings the professor’s theories are based, journeys ever deeper into the African jungle. "}],[{"start":162.96,"text":"A work of dizzying ambition, there are traces of Milan Kundera in Oloixarac’s desire to master political turmoil through the prism of philosophy. "},{"start":171.077,"text":"In Savage Theories’ dark propulsion towards ever more scabrous ground, there is also something of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. "},{"start":178.119,"text":"The most pleasure is to be found in Oloixarac’s meanderings — a cockroach musing on its death, a Levi advertisement featuring a poem for the disappeared. "},{"start":186.34900000000002,"text":"Oloixarac’s chameleonic style and playful ventriloquism are masterfully captured by translator Kesey. "}],[{"start":192.42000000000002,"text":"The novel’s central flaw, though, lies in its erasure of its characters’ interior lives at their own self-aware insistence that “personalities are only fallacies”. "},{"start":201.21200000000002,"text":"What we are left with is destabilising, absurdist and occasionally confounding — a brave, murky, sometimes infuriating Russian doll of a novel. "}],[{"start":210.16000000000003,"text":"Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac, translated by Roy Kesey Serpent’s Tail £10.99, 288 pages "}],[{"start":219.12000000000003,"text":"Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen "}],[{"start":225.74000000000004,"text":""}]],"url":"https://creatives.ftmailbox.cn/album/16b27c30-28e3-4e99-8da3-2cddcb2f4c02-1735189243.mp3"}

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野蛮理论：后革命时期阿根廷的爱情与暴力

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