“Literature is like a knife that you have in front of your heart while waiting for someone to push it deeper, very softly, as you say, ‘More, yes, push it more'”. Argentinian writer Pola Oloixarac on the pain and pleasure of writing.
Pola Oloixarac quotes the Mexican writer Margo Glantz and adds that she loves “that idea, that there’s something related to the flesh at risk when you write. That life and death are somehow there and that, still, it can be perfectly playful despite it having all these intense connotations.”
She explains that the kind of books she prefers are the ones “that evoke in me a feeling of being at the beach after a terrible storm. I am shaking with cold, I’m naked, and I’m thinking that something amazing just happened.” Oloixarac adds that “this sort of transformation I feel is like a journey. I’d love to write books like those.”
“For me, the fun part about being a writer, which I see in other female authors I read, is that we use the human body a lot, and we have a very clear sense of a type of emotional close-up also a bit brutal in relation to feelings that were not openly described.”
“I love the idea of an incredibly sensual literature that lets you feel the character’s heartbeat even if the character is more cerebral.”
Pola Oloixarac describes her novel Mona as dealing with bleak subjects: “I think the book’s dark core has to do with the violence against women that women suffer from. That’s why it was important to me for the book to be so carnal.”
“It’s one way to deal with the pain and the trauma, which I’m very interested in because I think all women suffer from it – and we all have to keep going.”
Pola Oloixarac, (a pseudonym for Paola Caracciolo) is an Argentine writer, journalist and translator. She was born in Buenos Aires in 1977. Her debut novel, ‘Savage Theories’, was a breakout bestseller in Argentina and was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award, and in 2010, Granta recognized her as one of the best young Spanish-language novelists. She was awarded the 2021 Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award. Oloixarac is a regular contributor to prominent media such as The New York Times and Rolling Stone. She is a founding editor of ‘The Buenos Aires Review’; a bilingual journal featuring contemporary literature in the Americas. Her third novel Mona came in Spanish in 2019 and was translated into English in 2021.
Pola Oloixarac was interviewed by Peter Adolphsen at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in connection to the Louisiana Literature festival in August 2022.
Camera: Simon Weyhe
Edit: Signe Boe Pedersen
Produced by Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2023.
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