Ojeda, Mónica: Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun

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, headed for Solar Noise: an eight-day festival that takes place in the infinite expanse of the páramo. Nestled on the side of a volcano, it is a world of mysticism, shamanism and underground music, a world in tune with the thunder of the earth and the bellows of the mountains, a world in which the belief systems of Ecuador‘s indigenous communities live on. Noa also harbours a secret motive for attending the festival: she‘s been drawn there in search of her father, who abandoned her as a child, and who now lives somewhere near the festival site. But soon after their arrival, she becomes prone to somnambulism and begins speaking in a voice that is not her own. Uncertain of whether Noa is in danger or is communing with something primal and eternal, 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, trauma from transcendence, and ecstasy from oblivion. 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.