Pola Oloixarac's Dark Constellations: A Review

Pola Oloixarac, Dark Constellations (New York: Soho Press, 2019). 202 pages. Translated by Roy Kesey.

Remember Donald Rumsfeld’s words to the press twenty years ago, in 2002? ‘[…] as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.’ These latter ones are the scary ones, I guess. The Incas contemplated dark constellations in the night skies, where the dark spaces (the unknowns) were the object of interest rather than the bright, visible known points, the stars.

Argentine Pola Oloixarac weaves three stories into an unusual, weird and at times a little clumsy volume. The first part is set in the late 19^th century: explorer Niklas Bruun ventures into caves on some Atlantic island. While in search for some hallucinogenic stuff that would allegedly erase whatever it is that separates one species from others, he and his group become the more-than-willing prisoners of a tribe whose women profusely engage in sexual intercourse with the visitors.

The second part has an enough promising start – it is truly hilarious and Oloixarac proves she does have the skill. An Argentine student travels to Brazil and gets pregnant. Her son is Cassio, who will become a notorious hacker and will eventually be hired by a big corporation with less than clearly defined aims and purposes. Governments and corporations seem engaged in a race to discover the way they would be able to capture our DNA either by means of real samples or using strange, ever-present instruments that resemble facial-recognition devices called Bionoses. Everyone, be careful where you fart! Your DNA might be collected and used against your will.

The final part brings in Piera, an Argentine biologist. It is set in just a couple of years’ time. She teams up with Cassio in an obscure plot to develop viruses and plant them across the whole world via the web.

The author seems to focus strongly on big issues, no doubt: where are we heading as Humanity? And what might be the consequences of blending the human and the technological in the context of a world where all of our data has fast become merchandise for sale? Scary, yes. The unknown unknowns!

Whatever might be uniting the goal of Bruun’s travels and Cassio and Piera’s heavily marijuana-induced plans to, well, do something that I found mind-boggling and pretty obscure, I may have missed. If Dark Constellations is intended to terrify us about where evolution is taking us, perhaps a little less vagueness and darkness would help. Lots of references to computer developments and popular culture of the 90s and later do not help us much to follow the scanty plot the book offers.