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.

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda

 

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Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun

by Mónica Ojeda

Translated by Darah Booker

’Ojeda invites you to an Andean retro-futuristic festival in the mountains. Psychedelia, volcanos, disintegration. And then the language burns and nothing is what it seems’ - Mariana Enriquez

The ear is the organ of fear. It is a door to that which is not of this world. Leaving behind the dread and decay of the city, Noa and her best friend, Nicole, travel up into the Andes, heading for Solar Noise: an eight-day festival that takes place on the side of a volcano, in the infinite expanse of the páramo. A world of mysticism and underground music, in tune with the thunder of the earth and the bellows of the mountains. Noa has been drawn there in search of her father, who, wrestling with the violence of Ecuador, abandoned her as a child. But soon after their arrival at the festival, Noa appears possessed, speaking in a voice that is not her own. Believing Noa to be in danger, Nicole struggles to care for her friend. Until, as the party spills into Inti Raymi - the Incan festival of the sun - the girls’ desire for belonging burns, incandescent, collapsing the thin membrane separating life from death, and trauma from transcendence. Wild and incantatory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun is both an hallucinogenic trip of a novel, and a heartfelt meditation on love, family and kinship - one that announces the arrival of a major writer.

GRANTA