Undiscovered: A Novel

by Gabriela Wiener, Julia Sanches (Translator)

Overview

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

“An intimate story from the family archive that is also the infamous history of our continent.”—Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive 

Award-winning Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener delivers her stunning English breakthrough in this "appealingly raw" (NPR) and "incisive" (Publishers Weekly) work of autofiction that explores colonialism through one woman’s family ties to both the colonized and colonizer. 

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063256682
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/26/2023
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	350,190
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Gabriela 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.

Editorial Reviews

07/17/2023

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. Agent: María Lynch, Casanovas & Lynch. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Wiener has rescued an intimate story from the family archive, a story that is also the infamous history of our continent, with her signature intellect and irreverent wit. 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

"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

"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

From the Publisher