Mónica Ojeda / A Life Less Governed by Death

 

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda. Translated by Sarah Booker. Coffee House Press, 2026. 240 pages.

A Life Less Governed by Death

Ecuadoran author Mónica Ojeda’s new novel is a celebration of the transfiguring power of dance, music, and neo-shamanistic knowledge.

Cory Oldweiler

26 May 2026

EARLIER THIS YEAR, The Yale Review ran an essay by Aria Aber, in which the German-born author reflects on her bygone clubbing days in Berlin. One of several framing devices Aber uses to consider her time in the city’s underground party scene is “the difference between ‘day knowledge’ and ‘night knowledge,’” with the latter being that “feeling of [her] mind: altered, wounded, almost unbearably alive.” I never was part of the techno scene, but in college and, to a lesser degree, in grad school, live music in small bars or clubs was a huge part of my life, and a number of Aber’s themes resonated with me, particularly her observations on how music and dance can be a search both for communal belonging and for solitary escape, a way to loosen the reins of control over your life, and a means of raging against the lack of control you have over the world around you.

I thought of Aber’s essay almost immediately after I began reading Ecuadoran author Mónica Ojeda’s latest novel, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun, which tells the story of a group of young women and men seeking enlightenment, escape, and empowerment high in the Andes. The novel, originally published in 2024 as Chamanes eléctricos en la fiesta del sol, is now available in a generally excellent English-language translation from Sarah Booker, who had a formidable task in managing a text that relies so heavily on references to the mythology, traditions, and culture of the Inca, Kichwa, and other Indigenous Andean groups, subjects with which most English-language readers will have little familiarity.

The beating heart of Electric Shamans is Noa, who goes on twinned journeys over the course of the novel—one a successful spiritual awakening, the other an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reconnect with her estranged father. Noa’s voice is never directly heard, however, which is ironic because it ultimately becomes one of the most powerful forces in the novel, the voice of a leader and a budding shaman, likened to the voice of lightning, the voice of a mare. Instead, Noa’s story is told by others, mainly her best friend Nicole, who knew that Noa was open to and perhaps even seeking change when the two of them left Guayaquil to go to the Andes: “Those were days of ardor, of the urge to expand and take up more space in the world.” Nicole remains by Noa’s side from the Solar Noise Festival, which opens the novel, to the celebration of the winter solstice, known as Inti Raymi, and into the high forest, where Ernesto, Noa’s father, lives. Along the way, the two 18-year-olds meet a handful of other seekers with whom they take drugs, make music, dance, sing, and, above all, fight against the overwhelming urge to succumb to the hopelessness deriving from the death and decay around them, something Nicole reiterates again and again: “Noa and I climbed the mountains to remember there must be something more to life than death.”

Solar Noise, which is in its fifth year, sounds like a distinctively Ecuadoran (one band plays flutes “made from condor wings”) mash-up of Burning Man and an EDM rave, “eight days and seven nights of experimental shamanic noise, of underground post-Andean music, of ancestral thrash retrofuturism.” The festival takes place about four hours south of the capital, Quito, on the high Andean plateau, or paramo, surrounded by volcanic peaks, including Chimborazo, El Altar, and Sangay, the latter of which has officially been in a continuous state of eruption since 2019. This very-much-alive, often violent state of nature is key to understanding not only how the Inca and other regional groups see the earth but also how Nicole sees her relationship with Noa: “[W]e only knew the violence of men and nature but longed for joy and pleasure. A life less governed by death.” She mentions that 15 volcanoes had erupted “by the time” she and Noa met when they were 12 years old and looking at a fissure opened by an earthquake. Six years later, things have gotten worse: there are 30 active volcanos, according to Nicole. And the violence of men remains, on an individual scale, with fathers who leave or are abusive or are alcoholics, and on a national scale, with criminals and sicarios and cartels killing people and raping women.

Among those Nicole and Noa take up with at Solar Noise are Pedro and Carla, a “galactic technocumbia” duo who incorporate NASA recordings (think “auroras on Jupiter, and astral and nebula pulsations”) into their computer and synthesizer music; Fabio and Pam, the former a musician who claims there are tzantzas, or shrunken heads, inside his drum, and the latter a partygoer who is pregnant with another man’s baby; and Mario, one of several Diabluma dancers who play a prominent role in Inti Raymi festivities. Several of these hangers-on narrate chapters in the novel, but we learn so little about most of them that they function less as additional characters in the story than as sentient set dressing or props that observe Noa and comment on what they see, though what they see is generally not terribly different from what Nicole sees.

The exception is Pam, whose unique insight into Noa and Nicole possibly derives from the fact that the three of them have an intense, if brief, sexual relationship that also includes Fabio: “[W]e fucked and fucked and it was glorious, so glorious, but we could tell that Noa didn’t like women, and that was a major bummer, oof, what a major bummer that a girl would like men so much, wild stuff.” Later Pam calls Noa “a manipulable girl with serious daddy issues” and sees Nicole as putting too much pressure on her friend. “[T]he beauty of friendship demands distance,” Pam observes. “If you get too close, you contaminate it, that’s the contradiction of desire: If you trap it, you suffocate it.”

Another figure Nicole and Noa meet is 25-year-old Ariruma Pantaguano, “a post-apocalyptic poet, representative of the new wave of ancestral cli-fi and ya-anarcho-lit, a magician, conjurer of symbols, lyric shaman, and Andean rhapsodist,” who thankfully goes by the helpful aptronym “the Poet.” Nicole is not terribly impressed with the Poet, saying that “his grandiloquence was unbearable: He said things that mixed politics, neoshamanism, and religion and didn’t make any sense.” She contrasts her own reaction with a recognition that others, particularly Noa, were “steeped in the myth and saw meaning I barely understood.” That acknowledgment could also apply to Ojeda’s novel more generally. Booker’s translation is eminently readable and enjoyable from purely a storytelling standpoint, but it frequently feels as if Ojeda is alluding to deeper meanings that might only be realized by those who are more familiar with her inspirations and source material. Such layered meaning is regularly present in so-called Western fiction that draws on or is conversant with, say, the Bible or Greek and Roman mythology, reference points that readers in the United States have likely encountered frequently throughout their lives and education. Ojeda’s use of Incan and Kichwa beliefs and traditions is bolstered by brief chapters from “the songstresses,” which almost act as mythological exposition, but the larger significance of the novel still feels elusive at times.

That said, Booker helpfully uses context to explain the many untranslated terms that she retains, words like “soroche,” which means altitude sickness in the Andes; “chagras,” who are Ecuadoran campesinos and horsemen; and “yachak,” which is “a shaman who knows.” But longer Kichwa phrases, such as “Wayra huañuy, wayra puca, wayra sorochi, wayra ritu,” or the recurrent “Ñawpa pachapi,” appear without any explication. Allowing some words and phrases to remain untranslated in English-language editions is a valuable way to help immerse the reader in the culture from which the novel originated, and for me it’s an essential quality of successful translations. Booker hits a perfectly fine balance with her decisions, but I do wish she had given some indication of the meaning or significance of those phrases whose meanings aren’t inferable. Perhaps the best way to have handled this with a novel as steeped in myth and tradition as Electric Shamans would have been an occasional footnote or, ideally, a translator’s note that could have added to the uninformed reader’s general understanding of Kichwa and Incan culture while also providing a source to return to if you forgot what yachak means.

Another group Nicole and Noa hear about at Solar Noise are “the disappeared,” several dozen festivalgoers who remain in the Andes year-round, living communally “in caves, mountain forests, and godforsaken valleys. No one knew why, or that’s what they said, only that they were among us, because they always return to Noise.” Each year, the disappeared recruit new members who are eager to run “away from all that tragedy in search of music.” While on one level the disappeared sound a bit like hippies who turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, it’s impossible to ignore the specific use of the term “the disappeared” in a Latin American context, where it immediately connotes “los desaparecidos,” the countless victims of political, military, and cartel-related violence in Central and South America over the past 60 years. Ojeda’s novel alludes to such violence on several occasions, including when Nicole reflects on the period after she and Noa first met, a time of “army tanks, and on the radio a woman with a shrill voice [who] said that Guayaquil and Manta were still in flames, Esmeraldas was under siege, and there were riots in Quito.” But in the present day of the novel, this type of violence always simmers just off the page, coming closest to our characters when Noa, Nicole, and the others are making their way from Solar Noise to the summit of El Altar, where the solstice celebration takes place.

Before Inti Raymi, which is also the start of the new year on the Andean calendar, Noa interacts with a horse who has been struck by lightning, and she starts sleepwalking backward, telling Nicole that “there’s an ancient dream drumming in [her] head.” She makes further connections to the spirits of the natural world as the group welcomes the sun on El Altar. Her biggest growth comes once she and Nicole go to “Llucud, the mountain forest of Leonán” where her father lives, in the Chambo canton. Ernesto, a 60-year-old hunter and taxidermist, hasn’t seen his daughter for a decade, since abandoning Noa and her mother. His chapters are often lyrical, laid out with unconventional line breaks, and characterized by a frank assessment of his shortcomings and regrets. He’s in the forest partly to escape his past sins—both personal, toward his family, and professional, from when he played his own part in Ecuador’s cycle of violence as a civil engineer: “We evicted more than one hundred families and demolished their houses, and the dealers threatened to kill us.” He and Noa barely interact with each other, but she does connect with her late grandmother, who was a shaman, an artist, a magician, and—to some—a witch. Noa’s grandmother made her own taxidermy creatures, her “monsters,” hybridized beasts inspired by myth, such as “an alpaca with a tortoise shell and duck feet.” Noa finds her grandmother’s songbook, moves into her old room, and claims her possessions, craft, and knowledge as her own, almost as if she’s a reincarnation of her ancestor.

Judged through the lens of conventional Western storytelling, the visit to Ernesto’s takes place after Inti Raymi, but time in the novel is not so simple. As is noted on the interstitial section title pages, the meeting between Noa and her father takes place in the year 5540 according to the Andean calendar, while Solar Noise and Inti Raymi take place in 5550. For the Inca and other groups, time is nonlinear, a point Ojeda alludes to in a brief recitation of sources at the end of the novel. This concept of time is another element that could have been explained in a translator’s note, particularly as it relates to the word “pacha,” which appears in a few guises throughout, though its dual meaning of space and time is only hinted at when the Poet tells Nicole and Noa that the call of the shaman is “the rhythm of the pacha, the music of space-time demanding a mutation.”

As Noa finds her role in the world, perhaps even her destiny, both Nicole and her father have to let her go. It’s much easier for the latter to do so because he never loved her enough and realizes that “the attempt to recover what is lost is a failed project.” He has made his peace, but Nicole is not at the same place in her life, fearing that if she stops “taking care of” Noa, then “all that will be left of [herself] will be this bitterness toward a life aged too early.” For Nicole, the solace of music and dance is one and the same with her friend; Noa, however, has found a replacement. “Noa found in music a language that helped her strengthen her love of life, a language I’d only found in our friendship,” Nicole notes. She has to open her ears to different voices, different influences, different sources of knowledge, Noa tells her, which is also a perfect encapsulation of why Ojeda’s novel, despite its challenges, is worth your attention.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

Cory Oldweiler writes regularly about literature in translation for several publications, including Words Without Borders and the Southwest Review. His criticism has also appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and the Star Tribune, among other outlets.

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