Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener confronts her complicated family heritage. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, spoils of European colonialism, many stolen from her homeland of Peru. As she peers at countless sculptures of Indigenous faces, each resembling her own, she sees herself in them—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 returns to Peru. In alternating strands, she begins to probe her father’s infidelity, her own polyamorous relationship, and the history of her colonial ancestor, unpacking the legacy that is her birthright. From the eye-patched persona her father adopted to carry out his double life to the brutal racism she encounters in her ancestor Charles’s book, she traces a cycle of abandonment, jealousy, and fraud, in turn reframing her own personal struggles with desire, love, and race.
Translated by Julia Sanches
REVIEWS
"Gabriela Wiener is a completely unique talent: a graceful storyteller, an acute observer of human vanity, a writer of bold, often delightful insights. Every book she writes is an event not to be missed." — Daniel Alarcón, PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist and Author of At Night We Walk in Circles
“Undiscovered has an appealingly raw, confessional tone, but its prose is highly polished. Sanches' translation does not have an extraneous word. It is also—fittingly, for a book about post-colonial history—committed to retaining the original text's Peruvian-ness. . . . Gabriela, who calls herself ‘the most Indian of the Wieners,’ cannot forget that: In Sanches' exceptional translation, neither can anyone else.” — NPR
"Gabriela Wiener's ease and grace allow her in Undiscovered to explore family, desire, racism, colonialism and being a migrant both tenderly and crudely, vulnerable yet resolute like her beautiful prose." — Mariana Enríquez, Author of Our Share of Night
PRODUCT DETAILS
Hardcover Edition
Publisher: Pushkin Press
ISBN:
978-1782279327
Pages: 192
