Undiscovered
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- 8,49 €
Publisher Description
'An intimate story from the family archive, a story that is also the infamous history of our continent' Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive'Powerful and searing' Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream
A provocative autobiographical novel that reckons with the legacy of colonialism through one woman's family ties to both colonised and coloniser
In an ethnographic museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener is confronted with her unusual inheritance. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artefacts, the spoils of European colonial plunder. As she peers through the glass, she sees sculptures of Indigenous faces that resemble her own - but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener.
In the wake of her father's death, Gabriela begins delving into all she has inherited from her paternal line. From the brutal trail of racism and theft that Charles left behind to revelations of her father's infidelity, she traces a legacy of abandonment, jealousy and colonial violence, in turn reframing her own struggles with desire, love and race. Seeking relief from these personal and historical wounds, Gabriela turns to the body and desire as sources of both constraint and potential freedom.
Blending personal, historical and fictional writing, Undiscovered tells of a search for identity beyond the old stories of patriarchs and plunder. Subversive, intimate and fiercely irreverent, it builds to a powerful call for decolonization.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Peruvian writer Wiener (Sexographies) plumbs the depths of her family history while exploring the legacy of colonialism in this incisive work of autofiction. The narrator, a self-described "chola" or dark-skinned Peruvian woman named Gabriela, lives in Spain in a queer polyamorous triad, and is proud of her nontraditional life. Then her beloved father dies, and she returns to Peru in mourning. There, she inquires into the lives of patriarchal figures further back in her family's history, including her great-great-grandfather, the Austrian-French explorer Charles Wiener, who brought Indigenous artifacts back to Europe for display. As she researches her ancestor, she also learns about her father and his infidelities. Weiner shifts seamlessly from the intimate to the historical, often with humor (on Charles Wiener's writings on Bolivia and Peru: "He is... without a doubt, the creator of the story's hero: himself. Had he lived in the twenty-first century, he might have been accused of the worst possible crime an author can be accused of today: writing autofiction"). Weiner's slim and affecting novel will whet readers' appetites for more.
