Vikinga Bonsái
Ana Ojeda
NOVEL | 2019 | 144 pages
Ana Ojeda dives into the depths of writing and resurfaces with a novel that pauses on the generosity of relationships, and in which slang, Calabrian, and inclusive language coexist in baroque community: in its exuberance, but also in its particularity, Vikinga Bonsái confirms that language is alive and that it is constructed by all of us.
Vikinga Bonsái lives with Maridito, who is traveling through the Paraguayan jungle and with whom she has a teenage son: Pequeña Montaña. Her days' journey is traced by a bicycle that knows no route except for Boedo-San Cristóbal-Boedo, taking her from home to work and from work back home, with only a stop to load up based on what's on a menu that often has little flavor, before, at long last, bed. Until one morning, her phone screen lights up and an invitation that is hard to ignore pops in the group chat "Apocalipsicadas": dinner with friends. From then on, the novel moves at a relentless pace between situations that alternate between the desperate and the absurd.
RIGHTS: spanish ETERNA CADENCIA
“In the novel Vikinga Bonsái, the author doesn’t merely tell a story. She also, or perhaps above all, invents a language, recovering the forgotten child-like joy of playing with words to find definitions that are different from those petrified in the dictionary (...) Vikinga Bonsái is a magic wand that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary and turns a ‘little life’ into an event.”
“The narrator constructs a Babel from which all the accumulated languages flow out: English, Italian, French, slang, the language of hashtags, the language of tweets and texts, and it all flows as though we were also polyglot readers of this varied lexical spectrum, or as though it were possible to learn more words at a time of saturation.”
“If language is the homeland, as is often said, in Vikinga Bonsái Ana Ojeda (Buenos Aires,1979) takes risks and crosses borders, making use of current jargon, inclusive language, and hashtags, as though she wanted to establish the sonorous territory of our contemporary lives.”
BY ANA OJEDA:
Vikinga bonsai
FICTION, 2019
Mosca blanca mosca muerta
FICTION, 2017
Necias y nercias
STORIES, 2017
No es lo que pensás
FICTION, 2015
La invención de lo cotidiano
STORIES, 2013
Motivos particulares
STORIES, 2013
Falso contacto
FICTION, 2012
Modos de asedio
FICTION, 2007