"With tremendous intellect and her irreverent wit, Wiener rescues an intimate story from the family archive, a story that is also the infamous history of our continent. Her prose, sober and forward, is a breath of fresh air; her view allows us to be testimonies of Latin America's cycles of plundering and looting."--Valeria Luiselli, author of The Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends
An award-winning Peruvian journalist and writer delivers her stunning English breakthrough, blending fact and fiction in an autobiographical novel that faces the legacy of colonialism through one woman's family ties to both the colonized and colonizer.
Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener finds herself confronted by her complicated family heritage. Visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, she peers at countless sculptures of Indigenous faces each nearly identical to her own and recognizes herself in them - but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener. Wiener's "grand" contribution to history: the near rediscovery of Machu Picchu, nearly 4,000 plundered artifacts, a book about Peru, and a bastard child.
In the wake of her father's death, Gabriela begins to unpack the legacy that is her birthright. From the brutal racism she encounters in her ancestor Charles's book to her father's infidelity, she traces a cycle of abandonment, jealousy and colonial violence, in turn reframing her own personal struggles with desire, love, and race. As she explores the history of two continents, her investigation brings her closer and closer to the more intimate realm where both colonizer and colonized ultimately converge- the body- and her own desire to free it. Guided by a penetrating eye and fearsome wit, Undiscovered embarks the reader on a quest to pick up the pieces of something shattered long ago in the hopes of making it whole once again.
Probing wounds both personal and historical, Undiscovered is a culminating labor for our age, an earnest attempt to decolonize one's own desire.
Translated by Julia Sanches
Show more"With tremendous intellect and her irreverent wit, Wiener rescues an intimate story from the family archive, a story that is also the infamous history of our continent. Her prose, sober and forward, is a breath of fresh air; her view allows us to be testimonies of Latin America's cycles of plundering and looting."--Valeria Luiselli, author of The Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends
An award-winning Peruvian journalist and writer delivers her stunning English breakthrough, blending fact and fiction in an autobiographical novel that faces the legacy of colonialism through one woman's family ties to both the colonized and colonizer.
Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener finds herself confronted by her complicated family heritage. Visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, she peers at countless sculptures of Indigenous faces each nearly identical to her own and recognizes herself in them - but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener. Wiener's "grand" contribution to history: the near rediscovery of Machu Picchu, nearly 4,000 plundered artifacts, a book about Peru, and a bastard child.
In the wake of her father's death, Gabriela begins to unpack the legacy that is her birthright. From the brutal racism she encounters in her ancestor Charles's book to her father's infidelity, she traces a cycle of abandonment, jealousy and colonial violence, in turn reframing her own personal struggles with desire, love, and race. As she explores the history of two continents, her investigation brings her closer and closer to the more intimate realm where both colonizer and colonized ultimately converge- the body- and her own desire to free it. Guided by a penetrating eye and fearsome wit, Undiscovered embarks the reader on a quest to pick up the pieces of something shattered long ago in the hopes of making it whole once again.
Probing wounds both personal and historical, Undiscovered is a culminating labor for our age, an earnest attempt to decolonize one's own desire.
Translated by Julia Sanches
Show moreGabriela Wiener is a Peruvian writer and journalist. Her books
include Sexographies, a collection of gonzo journalism about
contemporary sex culture. Her work has been widely published in
anthologies and translated into six languages. In 2018, she was
awarded Peru's National Journalism Award for her part in an
investigative report on gender violence. She currently resides in
Madrid.
Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Portuguese,
Spanish, and Catalan. Recent translations include Undiscovered by
Gabriela Wiener, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in
2024, Boulder by Eva Baltasar, shortlisted for the International
Booker Prize in 2023, and Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver, for
which she won the 2022 PEN translation prize. Born in Brazil, she
currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
"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"Reading Undiscovered, I wondered what so captivated me
about this novel. Was it Gabriela's innate ability to plunder all
sorts of convention? Her persistent exploration of our deepest
despairs-the weight and falsehoods of the stories and imperatives
we inherit? All this, but Undiscovered is also spurred on by a yet
more profound and radical strength: the spirit of fury. Powerful
and searing, this novel snaps, bucks, heals, and snaps
again..."
-- Samanta Schweblin, Author of the National Book Award winning
Seven Empty Houses"[An] incisive work of autofiction . . .
shift[ing] seamlessly from the historical to the intimate, often
with humor. . . . Wiener's slim and affecting novel will whet
readers' appetites for more." -- Publishers Weekly"To trail
Gabriela Wiener, to follow in her footsteps, dreaming of reaching
her, is one of the few luxuries we have left." -- Alejandro Zambra,
Author of Chilean Poet and Ways of Going Home"Even as it probes the
author's own family legacy, Undiscovered reminds readers of the
importance of confronting the white-savior myths that form the
basis of so much of what we call 'history.'" -- BookPage"A
compelling search for identity that explores the complicated
relationship between the person you want to be and the stories of
the past that might have made you. This is an exploration of
colonialism's surprising effects on a writer investigating her
antecedents and ancestors starting from a display case of Peruvian
artefacts in Paris and ending in a story of family, love and
desire." -- Jury of the 2024 International Booker Prize"Powerful,
genre-transcending... A quiet, lucid triumph" -- Irish Times"Can
you imagine a book starring the search for a European ancestor who
was a Peruvian ceramic thief, of a bleached and bastard
great-grandfather, of polyamory and its deceits, of the grief for a
father's loss, of the heterosexual family and their shameful
secrets, of the anticolonialist sex workshops. . . ? Step by step,
what seems to be a random encounter of a sewing machine and an
umbrella on a dissection table becomes the best book that I've read
about filiation and love in the contemporary postcolonial
condition. Gabriela Wiener has created queer and decolonial
psychogenealogy!" -- Paul B. Preciado"An investigative odyssey
prompted by a fresh wound . . . where the intimate drama of a
family is subsumed into the grander cosmos of colonialism. . . . A
beautiful artifact." -- Dolores Reyes, Author of Eartheater"Wiener
uses as raw material the arrogance of Eurocentric violence to
create radically beautiful and necessary narrations for the
antiracist fights." -- Daniela Ortiz"A collective autobiography in
the key of decolonization; a reckoning unafraid to interrogate
itself . . . that inspires awe and shudders." -- Cristina Rivera
Garza"A rollicking decolonial fact-fiction remix of ... [Wiener's
family] histories, the life of her great-great-great grandfather,
the explorer Charles Wiener, and how all this time plays out in her
own body, and her current life, and polyamorous household in
Madrid." -- Electric Literature
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