28. Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener
translation: from Spanish by Julia Sanches, 2023
OPD: 2021
format: 183-page hardcover
acquired: April read: May 5-8 time reading: 4:29, 1.5 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: contemporary autofiction theme: Booker 2024
locations: Spain and Lima, Peru
about the author: Peruvian writer, chronicler, poet and journalist, born in Lima, Peru in 1975. She has lived in Spain since 2003.

My 7th from the International Booker longlist and another that I liked a lot but didn't love. (The award was given to [Kairos] on Tuesday.) What I especially liked, personally, was the touch of Jewish history, the autofiction (a theme in the longlist) and the nature of the overall structure - namely that it's a little random. What I didn't like was the shocking lines she puts in there, although I seem to see some of its purpose.

Weiner is not a typical Peruvian name, especially for an ethnically Peruvian family. They trace their name to an Austrian-born Jewish explorer trying to become French. He explored Peru for France in the 19th-century, and returned with thousands of pillaged artefacts, many apparently currently displayed in a neglected Paris museum. But what he is most famous for is failing to discover Manchu Picchu. He searched but went off course in the mountains. So, as reflected in the title, it went undiscovered. He also left behind a pregnant Peruvian woman.

Gabriella Weiner is the also the daughter of prominent Peruvian activists. Weiner explores her ancestor, her father and his long-time extra-marital affair and her own polygamous marriage - to a Peruvian man and also a Spanish woman. And she uses herself, her personal failures to shock. If you like, a section is a very traditional and interesting exploration, then it's wrapped with some shocking thing she does or thinks. End of section. So, you're reading relaxed, and then momentarily uncomfortable you have to decide to continue, or set the book down. Readers are generally not going to like this narrator when we're done. We aren't going to like what she does.

Let's be clear. What she does is no worse than what her colonial ancestor did, or what her father did, but we, the reader, are really only deeply bothered when she does it. And this I think this part of her point - not that the past justifies her present issues, even if she does argue that on the surface, but how different we react to and how different we judge, intuitively, these two things. We tolerate the men, and the ancestral men, overlooking the women, but we condemn the wayward women deeply.

The novel is a reflection on family and cultural history, on historical uncertainties and crimes and the colonization of Peru, on racism, legacies, and on variations of unfaithfulness. Much remains undiscovered. An interesting work and, really, a nice addition to the International Booker longlist.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/360386#8544366 ( )

"The strangest thing about being alone here in Paris, in an anthropology museum gallery more or less beneath the Eiffel Tower, is the thought that all these statuettes that look like me were wrenched from my country by a man whose last name I inherited."

[b:Undiscovered|70240502|Undiscovered|Gabriela Wiener|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1679456884l/70240502._SX50_.jpg|92726711] by Journalist [a:Gabriela Wiener|4601950|Gabriela Wiener|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1306876363p2/4601950.jpg] is a dive into Peruvian history as she traces the lineage of her Jewish Austrian/French great great grandfather, an explorer in Peru, grieves the death of her father and tries to understand his dual life with two families, and documents the racism and colonial-tinged political slurs she's encountered as a Spanish resident. She also discusses her polyamory relationship with her husband, Jaime, and her girlfriend, Roci, plus other affairs she experiences. She's a busy narrator. Although the book is catalogued as fiction, I am thinking it is more like autofiction from the online interviews. She's a good writer but I bogged down a bit in the ancestral family tree hunts and wanted to whip back to the contemporary which yielded plenty of drama. Her exchanges with her mother toward the end were satisfying in conversation and letters, although my overall assessment is that I would rather see any one of the story lines developed, particularly the effects of her move to Spain and life there as a journalist. ( )

This is a fictionalized memoir – or ‘autofiction’ (new term for me).

Gabriela Wiener examines being a Peruvian indigenous person, while also having a fourth generation grandfather, Charles Wiener, who famously looted tens of thousands of pre-Columbia works from Peru that he took back to France. The author explores her grandfather’s legacy which seemed to include using (stealing) other explorers’ discoveries and research. He also left behind a native woman pregnant with his child, which he never knew. This child was (or perhaps was not) the founder of the numerous offspring with the surname Wiener in Peru.

The author lives in Spain in a polyamorous marriage to one man and another woman. She explores this aspect of her personality and how growing up with a split identity in Peru may contribute to her unusual marriage and affairs. In Peru she attends a group that explores why natives may prefer sexual relationships with those of the offspring of the white colonial offspromg mestizos.

It’s definitely a confusing background for her, with more than the average person’s conundrums in figuring out who she really is.

I thought that the indigenous/colonial conqueror tension was interesting. I was less interested in her explorations of her sexuality – frankly reading about other people’s sex bores me. ( )

I am generally not a fan of autofiction, I usually find it insufferable. If anything works as autofiction, though, it is Wiener's look at the man who her family has long claimed to be her great-great-grandfather, Jewish Austrian-French colonial explorer/collector Carl/Charles Wiener. Is he though? Does it really matter if he is, since she has been raised on this dichotomy of being a brown Peruvian woman descended from a man who would have thought her "other"? She also recognizes and acknowledges (p104-106) the similarities of him making up stories or stealing the work/ideas/heritage of others to gain his own acceptance in France. As his possibly gggrandaughter writes autofiction and tells all about her romantic relationships and even her children. What's true? What's false? What has she made up vs what she might think true but is false?

And what do her husband, wife, and kids think of being shared with the world in this way? The youngest is probably too young to understand--I was hoping that maybe the children were true fiction, but there are pictures online. This just makes me feel so uncomfortable for these kids. ( )

Gabriela Wiener's Undiscovered reflects on issues of indigenous identity, colonialism, colorism, and gender norms. This might make Undiscovered sound polemical—and in a way it is—but these are polemics of identity, of nailing down a specific set of intersectionalities and exploring the ways they interrelate. Among other genres, Wiener writes autobiographical, reflective essays. The subtitle of this book, "a Novel," implies that we're reading fiction, but the personal, emphatic voice leaves readers wondering.

Undiscovered opens with reflections on her great-great grandfather, Charles Wiener, a 19th Century explorer of Peru, who was responsible for taking thousands of pre-Columbian artifacts from Peru to France. By today's standards, these acquisitions are proof of imperialist egoism and a lack of scientific rigor. Many of these objects remain unlabeled; details about their origin and context are missing. Charles Wiener describes them and the culture from which they come in paternalistic fashion.

Beginning with her great-great grandfather, Weiner explores her family and personal identity. She was born in Peru to what could be called a distaff line of the family. She's named Wiener, but she's more certain of her relationship to the Peruvian woman from whom her father and great grandfather descend, rather than the man whose last name she bears. This is where the issues is indigenous identity, colonialism, and colorism come in. As an adult, Wiener is a dark-skinned Peruvian-born woman living in Spain—where dark skin and Latin American origins lead others to assume certain things. That's she's a housekeeper, for example.

In Spain, Wiener is part of a "thruple," a marriage of three people, in this case Wiener, her Spanish husband and her wife, who is white. This is where the issue of gender norms come in, since they presume two-unit, male/female pairings. But the ways in which her marriage breaks with some norms leave other norms intact, so when she engages in an affair while settling the estate of her father in Peru, she finds herself consumed by her knowledge that she has betrayed the triad and that she doesn't know what the repercussions of that choice will be.

Undiscovered covers a broad range of topics. The movement among these feels abrupt sometimes. What connects them is Wiener's existence, but that "I Am" isn't sufficient as a narrative arc for a novel. Even for an autobiography, one could hope of a bit more. Still, the topics Wiener raises are interesting and her explorations have an integrity that straddles the fiction-autobiography boundary. Come to this book with a willingness to think about identity in historical, global, and gender terms. If you do that, you'll enjoy the sometimes bumpy ride Undiscovered offers.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own. ( )