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Undiscovered
An award-winning Peruvian journalist and international writer delivers her stunning English breakthrough work, blending fact and fiction in a genre-bending story of love, desire, heritage, and racism haunted by the specter of colonialism and absent fathers.
In 1878, the Jewish-Austrian explorer Charles Wiener prepares to be heralded by the scientific community at the Exposition Universelle. The magnificent fair of “technological advances” numbers among its attractions a human zoo; it is ultimately a display of the peak of scientific racism and the European imperialist project. Wiener's exhibited pedigree: the near rediscovery of Machu Picchu, nearly 4,000 plundered artifacts, a book about Peru, and a child.
A century and half later, when Gabriela Wiener visits the museum that houses the Wiener collection, she recognizes herself in the brown faces of the ceramic vessels her great-great-grandfather pillaged. Distraught over converging personal crises—the discovery of her bastard lineage, the death of her father, and the revelation of his second secret family—Gabriela embarks on a quest to pick up the pieces of something shattered long ago and hopefully make it whole again. Her quest leads her to trace the footprints of her family's founder, an illegitimate family lineage shared by many others, and to confront the inheritance of identity itself.
Written in the spirit of haunting emotional works of reckoning by Carmen Maria Machado and Ayad Ahktar, Undiscovered is a culminating labor for our age, an earnest attempt to decolonize one’s own desire.
Translated by Julia Sanches
In 1878, the Jewish-Austrian explorer Charles Wiener prepares to be heralded by the scientific community at the Exposition Universelle. The magnificent fair of “technological advances” numbers among its attractions a human zoo; it is ultimately a display of the peak of scientific racism and the European imperialist project. Wiener's exhibited pedigree: the near rediscovery of Machu Picchu, nearly 4,000 plundered artifacts, a book about Peru, and a child.
A century and half later, when Gabriela Wiener visits the museum that houses the Wiener collection, she recognizes herself in the brown faces of the ceramic vessels her great-great-grandfather pillaged. Distraught over converging personal crises—the discovery of her bastard lineage, the death of her father, and the revelation of his second secret family—Gabriela embarks on a quest to pick up the pieces of something shattered long ago and hopefully make it whole again. Her quest leads her to trace the footprints of her family's founder, an illegitimate family lineage shared by many others, and to confront the inheritance of identity itself.
Written in the spirit of haunting emotional works of reckoning by Carmen Maria Machado and Ayad Ahktar, Undiscovered is a culminating labor for our age, an earnest attempt to decolonize one’s own desire.
Translated by Julia Sanches
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2021
198 people are currently reading
11109 people want to read
About the author
Gabriela Wiener
40 books663 followersGabriela Wiener (Lima, 1975) es una escritora peruana, cronista, poeta y periodista, afincada en Barcelona desde el año 2003. Forma parte del grupo de nuevos cronistas latinoamericanos. Casada con el poeta y periodista Jaime Rodríguez Z.. Tiene una hija.
Estudió Lingüística y Literatura en la Universidad Católica de Lima, y un máster en Cultura histórica y Comunicaciones en Barcelona. Trabajó en el diario El Comercio. Fue miembro del consejo de redacción de la desaparecida revista Lateral. Colabora con una larga serie de medios, como Etiqueta Negra, El País o La Vanguardia. Es autora de dos libros de crónicas, y de la plaqueta de poesía Cosas que deja la gente cuando se va.
Estudió Lingüística y Literatura en la Universidad Católica de Lima, y un máster en Cultura histórica y Comunicaciones en Barcelona. Trabajó en el diario El Comercio. Fue miembro del consejo de redacción de la desaparecida revista Lateral. Colabora con una larga serie de medios, como Etiqueta Negra, El País o La Vanguardia. Es autora de dos libros de crónicas, y de la plaqueta de poesía Cosas que deja la gente cuando se va.
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August 7, 2025
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024
An erotic novel about decolonization.
I initially wanted to give the novel 4* because I found the subject interesting and enjoyed the writing well enough. However, two weeks after I finished, when I think back on this novel, I get a feeling of annoyance. I feel like the book should have contained a message, but it came down to nothing much.
This is an auto-fiction novel and I have mixed feelings about them. The degree of enjoyment for these kind of books depends a lot on how I click with the personality and style of the writer. I would say that all writers who choose autofiction are self-important people. You don’t write about yourself if you do not think you are more important than others you’re your story deserves to be heard by the world. So, for me is a question of how much this self-importance grates my senses and how much the writing anesthetizes my natural reserves for this genre. In Undiscovered, the results were so and so. *
Gabriela Wiener seems to be the descendant of an Austrian explorer, Charles Wiener, who plundered Peru of thousands of artifacts. Gabriela find her face similar with the ones on the stollen artifacts and has conflicted feelings about her ancestry. She feels Peruvian and angry about what her great-great-grandfather did but she also lives in Madrid and has a polyamorous relationship with a Peruvian husband and a white Spanish woman. When her father dies, she returns to Lima, where she tries to find more about her ancestor’s life and also of her father. We learn more about her father’s extramarital relationships together with the narrator’s own failure at fidelity.
I suppose there has to be some sort of symbolism in the alignment of Charles Wiener’s life, colonialism and the erotic entanglements of Gabriela and her father but I missed it. Also, the joining of the Decolonizing Desire group by Gabriela was a wtf moment for me. It felt like that group was made only as an excuse for sex. I don’t know, towards the end it felt like the author tried to find a serious pretext to write a book about her sex life.
The following extract from the Booker Q&A explains why I felt the novel disjointed:
“Undiscovered is a kind of book made of books – there are three partial novels that converge in a single volume. The ancestral novel, the novel about the unfaithful father, and the novel about the polyamorous girl don’t exist, but they ended up weaving together across the past decade to form this book. Some of the essayistic sections of the book had a previous life as ideas, disparate posts, newspaper columns. More than manuscripts or drafts, there were fragments of me that I devoted myself to gathering up and assembling into a whole, pieces of a patchwork, like those blankets our grandmothers used to make with scraps, something I finished sewing into shape in a year of writing and rewriting.“
*I understand the irony of my words since also must have a certain degree of self-importance when I presume that people are interested to read my opinion about autofiction.
An erotic novel about decolonization.
I initially wanted to give the novel 4* because I found the subject interesting and enjoyed the writing well enough. However, two weeks after I finished, when I think back on this novel, I get a feeling of annoyance. I feel like the book should have contained a message, but it came down to nothing much.
This is an auto-fiction novel and I have mixed feelings about them. The degree of enjoyment for these kind of books depends a lot on how I click with the personality and style of the writer. I would say that all writers who choose autofiction are self-important people. You don’t write about yourself if you do not think you are more important than others you’re your story deserves to be heard by the world. So, for me is a question of how much this self-importance grates my senses and how much the writing anesthetizes my natural reserves for this genre. In Undiscovered, the results were so and so. *
Gabriela Wiener seems to be the descendant of an Austrian explorer, Charles Wiener, who plundered Peru of thousands of artifacts. Gabriela find her face similar with the ones on the stollen artifacts and has conflicted feelings about her ancestry. She feels Peruvian and angry about what her great-great-grandfather did but she also lives in Madrid and has a polyamorous relationship with a Peruvian husband and a white Spanish woman. When her father dies, she returns to Lima, where she tries to find more about her ancestor’s life and also of her father. We learn more about her father’s extramarital relationships together with the narrator’s own failure at fidelity.
I suppose there has to be some sort of symbolism in the alignment of Charles Wiener’s life, colonialism and the erotic entanglements of Gabriela and her father but I missed it. Also, the joining of the Decolonizing Desire group by Gabriela was a wtf moment for me. It felt like that group was made only as an excuse for sex. I don’t know, towards the end it felt like the author tried to find a serious pretext to write a book about her sex life.
The following extract from the Booker Q&A explains why I felt the novel disjointed:
“Undiscovered is a kind of book made of books – there are three partial novels that converge in a single volume. The ancestral novel, the novel about the unfaithful father, and the novel about the polyamorous girl don’t exist, but they ended up weaving together across the past decade to form this book. Some of the essayistic sections of the book had a previous life as ideas, disparate posts, newspaper columns. More than manuscripts or drafts, there were fragments of me that I devoted myself to gathering up and assembling into a whole, pieces of a patchwork, like those blankets our grandmothers used to make with scraps, something I finished sewing into shape in a year of writing and rewriting.“
*I understand the irony of my words since also must have a certain degree of self-importance when I presume that people are interested to read my opinion about autofiction.
February 12, 2022
Ser peruano es ser racista. Esa es una de nuestras grandes verdades nacionales.
Uno de mis primeros recuerdos se remonta a mi fiesta de cuatro años, durante la cual, mi mayor preocupación, era que mis amigos no descubrieran quién era mi papá. No me preocupaba que lo vieran a él, sino que, al hacerlo, me vieran a mí y, así, se dieran cuenta de que yo no era tan blanco como todos creían que era, como nos habían enseñado que debemos ser.
Han pasado muchos años de eso; sin embargo, aún recuerdo con exactitud todo lo que me enseñó mi familia, mi colegio, la calle y los medios de comunicación. No sabía amarrarme los pasadores, cruzar la pista solo, ni bañarme sin ayuda de la nana, pero sí sabía qué color de ropa no usar, dónde no comer, con quiénes no juntarme. Y es que, de alguna manera, la infancia peruana se limita a eso: enseñarnos a ser lo menos cholos posible y lo más blancos que se pueda.
Algunos la tenemos más fácil que otros. Yo solo debía preocuparme por mi cabello ondulado y un color de piel que, mal que bien, se adaptaba al círculo social en el que me encontraba, pero otros debían dejar atrás su idioma, sus costumbres, su esencia. No hacerlo implicaba no poder ser parte de la vida nacional y convertirse en ciudadanos de segunda categoría (tercera y cuarta, en muchos casos).
Al final, la peruanidad termina reducida a una guerra racial en la que todos luchamos por ocultar nuestra verdadera identidad. Nos guste o no, no ser blanco era mal visto, pero ser blanco también. Por eso, no hay blanco peruano que, al menos en su cabeza, tenga una abuela chola, selvática o negra y te lo demuestra diciéndote “mira mi nariz, no es de blanco, la heredé de mi abuela”. Hay una urgencia vital de ser lo suficientemente blanco para ser aceptados, pero, al mismo tiempo, no serlo porque sabemos lo que eso implica.
Pero el tiempo pasa, las personas crecemos y, algunos de nosotros, nos damos cuenta de que el mundo no es como nos habían dicho que era. De pronto, un día, nos damos cuenta de que los negros no dejan de pensar a las cuatro de la tarde, de que los serranos no nos odian a muerte y que el gran problema de este país, a veces entendido como una maldición de proporciones bíblicas, no es nuestra infinita combinación de razas, idiomas e identidades sociales, sino nuestra incapacidad de ver al otro como un igual y, sobre todo, de vernos a nosotros mismos como iguales al otro.
Entonces, ¿qué hace uno con todo ese dolor? El dolor de saberse racista, de haber discriminado, de haber sido discriminado. El dolor de saber que el primer recuerdo que tienes de tu papá es siendo discriminado por ti mismo. ¿Cómo miras a los ojos a alguien que ha sido víctima del odio que te enseñaron a tener? ¿Cómo convives con alguien que te ha victimizado por el odio que le enseñaron a tener? ¿Qué haces cuando te miras al espejo y ves en ti tanto de lo que te enseñaron a odiar y llegaste a odiar durante tantos años?
Los caminos del perdón son los más urgentes y difíciles de andar, pero si queremos construir un país más justo, debemos hacerlo. Es necesario recorrerlos para no cargar a las futuras generaciones con las mismas taras sociales que nos cargaron a nosotros, para no heredarles nuestro dolor ancestral, con un origen tan remoto como el de nuestra patria, que nunca fue una, sino muchas, aunque nos cueste reconocerlo.
En “Huaco retrato”, Gabriela Wiener cuenta su propia historia como persona racializada, racista y discriminada. Por supuesto, su camino es diferente al mío, pero su dolor tiene su origen en el mismo punto que el mío y el de todos los peruanos, seamos o no conscientes de ello.
Uno de mis primeros recuerdos se remonta a mi fiesta de cuatro años, durante la cual, mi mayor preocupación, era que mis amigos no descubrieran quién era mi papá. No me preocupaba que lo vieran a él, sino que, al hacerlo, me vieran a mí y, así, se dieran cuenta de que yo no era tan blanco como todos creían que era, como nos habían enseñado que debemos ser.
Han pasado muchos años de eso; sin embargo, aún recuerdo con exactitud todo lo que me enseñó mi familia, mi colegio, la calle y los medios de comunicación. No sabía amarrarme los pasadores, cruzar la pista solo, ni bañarme sin ayuda de la nana, pero sí sabía qué color de ropa no usar, dónde no comer, con quiénes no juntarme. Y es que, de alguna manera, la infancia peruana se limita a eso: enseñarnos a ser lo menos cholos posible y lo más blancos que se pueda.
Algunos la tenemos más fácil que otros. Yo solo debía preocuparme por mi cabello ondulado y un color de piel que, mal que bien, se adaptaba al círculo social en el que me encontraba, pero otros debían dejar atrás su idioma, sus costumbres, su esencia. No hacerlo implicaba no poder ser parte de la vida nacional y convertirse en ciudadanos de segunda categoría (tercera y cuarta, en muchos casos).
Al final, la peruanidad termina reducida a una guerra racial en la que todos luchamos por ocultar nuestra verdadera identidad. Nos guste o no, no ser blanco era mal visto, pero ser blanco también. Por eso, no hay blanco peruano que, al menos en su cabeza, tenga una abuela chola, selvática o negra y te lo demuestra diciéndote “mira mi nariz, no es de blanco, la heredé de mi abuela”. Hay una urgencia vital de ser lo suficientemente blanco para ser aceptados, pero, al mismo tiempo, no serlo porque sabemos lo que eso implica.
Pero el tiempo pasa, las personas crecemos y, algunos de nosotros, nos damos cuenta de que el mundo no es como nos habían dicho que era. De pronto, un día, nos damos cuenta de que los negros no dejan de pensar a las cuatro de la tarde, de que los serranos no nos odian a muerte y que el gran problema de este país, a veces entendido como una maldición de proporciones bíblicas, no es nuestra infinita combinación de razas, idiomas e identidades sociales, sino nuestra incapacidad de ver al otro como un igual y, sobre todo, de vernos a nosotros mismos como iguales al otro.
Entonces, ¿qué hace uno con todo ese dolor? El dolor de saberse racista, de haber discriminado, de haber sido discriminado. El dolor de saber que el primer recuerdo que tienes de tu papá es siendo discriminado por ti mismo. ¿Cómo miras a los ojos a alguien que ha sido víctima del odio que te enseñaron a tener? ¿Cómo convives con alguien que te ha victimizado por el odio que le enseñaron a tener? ¿Qué haces cuando te miras al espejo y ves en ti tanto de lo que te enseñaron a odiar y llegaste a odiar durante tantos años?
Los caminos del perdón son los más urgentes y difíciles de andar, pero si queremos construir un país más justo, debemos hacerlo. Es necesario recorrerlos para no cargar a las futuras generaciones con las mismas taras sociales que nos cargaron a nosotros, para no heredarles nuestro dolor ancestral, con un origen tan remoto como el de nuestra patria, que nunca fue una, sino muchas, aunque nos cueste reconocerlo.
En “Huaco retrato”, Gabriela Wiener cuenta su propia historia como persona racializada, racista y discriminada. Por supuesto, su camino es diferente al mío, pero su dolor tiene su origen en el mismo punto que el mío y el de todos los peruanos, seamos o no conscientes de ello.
Read
December 16, 2021Encuentro totalmente normal todos los elogios que está recibiendo este libro. Gabriela Wiener ha hecho algo muy difícil: acercarnos de forma sencilla algo enorme y complejo como es la huella de la colonización. Para ello parte de dos pasados difíciles. El de su país, cuando un señor occidental se topó con él, y el suyo propio, para luego descomponerse, descomponernos y mostrarnos sin sutilezas que el presente sigue siendo blanco (y en botella) en el más triste y neoliberal de los sentidos, seas del color que seas. Me he reído, he llorado, me he sentido marrón y chola (aquí reside la magia de Wiener, en saber trasladarte a lo que ella quiera como lo hacen lxs grandes escritorxs) y he alargado todo lo que he podido sus 176 páginas porque habría querido que durara otras mil, que me acompañara constantemente para recordarme más a menudo dónde quedo yo en esta cadena trófica que llamamos civilización. Me ha fascinado cómo se habla aquí del cuerpo (¡el temazo de mi vida!), del absurdo de mentir o querer volcar tu propia culpa en quien te ama (este libro conversa de alguna manera con otros como "El matrimonio anarquista"), y, en fin, la forma en la que acaba convirtiendo esta obra en un conjunto compacto es algo maravilloso que sigue repicando en mi cabeza como una campanita y que me ha recordado al fabuloso poemario "Sánafabich" de Román Luján. "Huaco retrato" lo tiene todo para que yo lo llame perfecto y necesario.
March 28, 2024
UPDATE 28 March:having sat on this for the last couple of days, I'm still thinking about it and the way the 'decolonising desire' group works to unify the two strands of colonialism and the erotic so maybe 3 stars is too harsh, and 3.5 stars is more accurate to my experience so I'm rounding up to 4.
-------------------------------------
This is the sort of too obvious, snarky commentary that grated on me in this book: it makes Wiener sound like a rolling-eyed teen who's discovered colonialism and scientific racism for the first time and can't stop telling everyone about it. Which is a bit unfair as I suspect she's not as naive and simplistic as this book makes her narrator sound but this sort of stuff does her no intellectual favours: 'all of us have a white father. By that I mean, God is white. Or at least that's what we've been told. The colonizer is white. History is white and male.' This is announced as if it's a revelation, something we don't already know - and also elides the fact that there are and have been non-white colonizers: Japan's history, for example, or that of the Ottoman Empire. A little bit patronising, a little bit hitting us over the head with an uncomplicated message.
It's a shame as this book deals with important issues of colonialist narratives, the role of museums and their modes of display in continuing these fundamentally biased and ideologically skewed stories of 'our' past, of questions of repatriation and untangling the asymmetries of history.
The way this book makes a villain of Charles Wiener ('his path was laid out: to hell with historical truth! Long live theatrical archaeology!... Some scholars claim Wiener was an imposter and a fraud') is part of the over-simplification - how much more interesting he would have been as a genuine scholar shaped by the uneasy politics of his time, not so much trampling over the historical record and stealing artefacts for his own egotistic glorification, but someone working at a time when the detailed recording of provenance and objects in situ just wasn't yet an established methodology.
What worked better for me is the more personal side of the story as Gabi untangles her beloved father's unorthodox relationships and struggles with her own polyamory. Again, though, the presentation is slow: the narrator starts by agonising over her possible illegitimacy without seeming to be aware, within the fiction, that the concept of legitimacy is itself a construct of both capitalism and patriarchy to police and control women and the material inheritances of primogeniture, both possessions of the male. The book does work towards this understanding ('of all the hierarchies, the one that legitimizes one child over another is by far the most idiotic') but it's a bit of a bore to have to have this explained if we already reject patriarchy's rules.
So, for me, this is a potentially fascinating book that goes down an over-simplistic and uncomplicated route. It's short at just over 120 pages and perhaps that just doesn't give the topics room to breath. I would have wanted a more sophisticated narrator to do justice to the dual strands and the second one of rejecting the ideology of heteronormative marriage, family and parenting deserves far more attention. I might well prefer Wiener's Sexographies where she apparently lets her wilder side free.
-------------------------------------
When Wiener arrived in Peru, he visited parts of the country that had remained largely unexplored. By white people, needless to say.
This is the sort of too obvious, snarky commentary that grated on me in this book: it makes Wiener sound like a rolling-eyed teen who's discovered colonialism and scientific racism for the first time and can't stop telling everyone about it. Which is a bit unfair as I suspect she's not as naive and simplistic as this book makes her narrator sound but this sort of stuff does her no intellectual favours: 'all of us have a white father. By that I mean, God is white. Or at least that's what we've been told. The colonizer is white. History is white and male.' This is announced as if it's a revelation, something we don't already know - and also elides the fact that there are and have been non-white colonizers: Japan's history, for example, or that of the Ottoman Empire. A little bit patronising, a little bit hitting us over the head with an uncomplicated message.
It's a shame as this book deals with important issues of colonialist narratives, the role of museums and their modes of display in continuing these fundamentally biased and ideologically skewed stories of 'our' past, of questions of repatriation and untangling the asymmetries of history.
The way this book makes a villain of Charles Wiener ('his path was laid out: to hell with historical truth! Long live theatrical archaeology!... Some scholars claim Wiener was an imposter and a fraud') is part of the over-simplification - how much more interesting he would have been as a genuine scholar shaped by the uneasy politics of his time, not so much trampling over the historical record and stealing artefacts for his own egotistic glorification, but someone working at a time when the detailed recording of provenance and objects in situ just wasn't yet an established methodology.
What worked better for me is the more personal side of the story as Gabi untangles her beloved father's unorthodox relationships and struggles with her own polyamory. Again, though, the presentation is slow: the narrator starts by agonising over her possible illegitimacy without seeming to be aware, within the fiction, that the concept of legitimacy is itself a construct of both capitalism and patriarchy to police and control women and the material inheritances of primogeniture, both possessions of the male. The book does work towards this understanding ('of all the hierarchies, the one that legitimizes one child over another is by far the most idiotic') but it's a bit of a bore to have to have this explained if we already reject patriarchy's rules.
So, for me, this is a potentially fascinating book that goes down an over-simplistic and uncomplicated route. It's short at just over 120 pages and perhaps that just doesn't give the topics room to breath. I would have wanted a more sophisticated narrator to do justice to the dual strands and the second one of rejecting the ideology of heteronormative marriage, family and parenting deserves far more attention. I might well prefer Wiener's Sexographies where she apparently lets her wilder side free.
May 6, 2022
Qué capa es Gabriela Wiener. En algunas páginas quiero abrazarla y acompañarla a hacer pollo frito, en otras quiero gritarle YO TAMBIÉN GABI y obligarla a que me pague la terapia porque su libro me destruyó. En fin, inolvidable realmente, excelente prosa, increíble formato, siempre tan asombrosa.
September 23, 2024
Polyamory versus cheating, colonialism, the fear of becoming one’s parents, casual racism, (lack of) fidelity in adultery and a course in decolonizing desire featuring glass dildos; Wiener brings a lot to the table in this narrative
That was the first time that someone shouted to me: “Go back to your country. Go home.”
The truth is, I would go home if I still had one.
Gabriela Wiener delivers an erudite and interesting book about how history and colonialism permeate into the current world and also into eroticism.
At times it feels a lot of the narrative in Undiscovered is just rich people with too much time imagining problems about identity, sexuality and privilege, but there are very interesting observations and analogies interspersed, so I rounded 3.5 stars for this International Booker Prize long-listed book.
The books starts off in Musee de Quay Branly in Paris, where Wiener, who is from Peru, sees the collection her great grandfather Charles Wiener took. Over 400.000 artefacts where taken to Europe, but still this Jewish born discoverer is most known for not discovering Machu Pichu.
Wiener meanwhile has a dying father who had lots of affairs, which lead to instability in her polyamorous relationship with a coloured man and a white woman. Colonialism is suggested to even impact desire, and the main character falls into a rabbit holes of affairs and workshops focused on decolonising her desires.
Besides these sex focussed scenes we also are confronted with genuinely emotion inducing scenes where the narrator is being confused for a maid or nanny based on the colour of their skin, and an email exchange with her mother near the end of the book has an emotional charge to it as well. I liked how the main character keeps her father alive through reading his gmail account, one email per day. The feeling of being unmoored due to a death of a parent is well executed (and even eerily immersive at times) and I would be keen to read more of the author.
Quotes:
Once you have written about yourself there is nothing in the world left to write about
A family is a fictional island in a sea of reality
I just gave up and became my father
Science is such a nazi
Who are we really
If you don’t want to be discriminated against in Peru you need to switch sides
I require too much sex to forget how little I love myself, how little I have been loved
I don’t think you can divorce sex from life
That was the first time that someone shouted to me: “Go back to your country. Go home.”
The truth is, I would go home if I still had one.
Gabriela Wiener delivers an erudite and interesting book about how history and colonialism permeate into the current world and also into eroticism.
At times it feels a lot of the narrative in Undiscovered is just rich people with too much time imagining problems about identity, sexuality and privilege, but there are very interesting observations and analogies interspersed, so I rounded 3.5 stars for this International Booker Prize long-listed book.
The books starts off in Musee de Quay Branly in Paris, where Wiener, who is from Peru, sees the collection her great grandfather Charles Wiener took. Over 400.000 artefacts where taken to Europe, but still this Jewish born discoverer is most known for not discovering Machu Pichu.
Wiener meanwhile has a dying father who had lots of affairs, which lead to instability in her polyamorous relationship with a coloured man and a white woman. Colonialism is suggested to even impact desire, and the main character falls into a rabbit holes of affairs and workshops focused on decolonising her desires.
Besides these sex focussed scenes we also are confronted with genuinely emotion inducing scenes where the narrator is being confused for a maid or nanny based on the colour of their skin, and an email exchange with her mother near the end of the book has an emotional charge to it as well. I liked how the main character keeps her father alive through reading his gmail account, one email per day. The feeling of being unmoored due to a death of a parent is well executed (and even eerily immersive at times) and I would be keen to read more of the author.
Quotes:
Once you have written about yourself there is nothing in the world left to write about
A family is a fictional island in a sea of reality
I just gave up and became my father
Science is such a nazi
Who are we really
If you don’t want to be discriminated against in Peru you need to switch sides
I require too much sex to forget how little I love myself, how little I have been loved
I don’t think you can divorce sex from life
May 12, 2024
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024
The theoretical construction and narrative intent of this slim novel are intriguing, but the result left me somewhat cold. Wiener's autofictional effort dives into her familial heritage, which is overshadowed by her ancestor Charles Wiener. Charles was born an Austrian Jew, he emigrated to France and became a Catholic explorer in South America who wrote the influential Voyage au Pérou et en Bolivie and stole artifacts that are now displayed in Paris. In Peru, he fathered an illegitimate child with a mestiza, which means that in Gabriela Wiener's Peruvian family, issues of race, religion, ancestral legitimacy and the dynamics of colonialism manifest.
The novel mixes the repercussions of this with the author's decision to live in a polyamorous relationship with her Latino husband Jaime Rodríguez Zavaleta and a much younger, white Spanish woman. Together, they live in Spain, raising Gabriela's daughter, while struggling with jealousy and infidelity - the ruminations on sexual politics climax (haha, sorry) in a workshop about "decolonializing desire" in which Gabriela participates. And there is one more twist: A French Charles Wiener expert doubts whether Charles was actually Gabriela's forebear (to be fair, that scientist has a legitimate reason to do so).
So you might now claim that there is A LOT going on here, but it's of course a realistic depiction of a complex heritage that, as Valeria Luiselli points out, stands pars pro toto for many individual destinies on the South American continent. At the same time, I always struggle with novels that put a very strong (in my opinion: too strong) emphasis on the inescapability of heritage, trauma, class, etc. - it makes me think of Didier Eribon who, in my humble opinion, underestimates the importance of personal agency as a means of power. The power to make decisions is a key component of human dignity, and Gabriela Wiener is a woman with a platform who has a rather vast corridor to play out personal responsibility, which is a good thing. Then again, I'm German, so everyone born post 1950 has to believe that history is not destiny and that we hold power over our personal actions and thus our future - otherwise we would all have to jump off a bridge.
So no, Wiener's father and she herself are not unfaithful because some forebear was an illegitimate child, that's just nonsense. Also, the author's sex life is generally way less interesting than the text seems to assume, especially the decolonializing desire group is rather silly. The many thematic aspects around colonialism and mixed heritage don't quite come together, and sure, you might claim that's an aesthetic translation of the topical point, but still, many passages are a chore to read. Plus, this is a narrator with plenty of reasons to be angry, so why add throw-away sentences à la "how annoying, one of my ancestors was a white man" and make the narrator appear less than smart (I was under the impression that the real problem was that this person was a racist who came to plunder her country for his own gain and the glory of France, but okay *sigh*). I would have loved to learn more on the aspect that foreign, Jewish-born Charles tried to seek security and acceptance in France by exoticising and exploiting indigenous populations in South America.
While there is a lot to admire in the ideas and use of thematic concepts, I have to admit that I found the result to be rather frustrating.
You can listen to our discussion on the podcast (International Booker, Latinx edition) here (in German): https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...
The theoretical construction and narrative intent of this slim novel are intriguing, but the result left me somewhat cold. Wiener's autofictional effort dives into her familial heritage, which is overshadowed by her ancestor Charles Wiener. Charles was born an Austrian Jew, he emigrated to France and became a Catholic explorer in South America who wrote the influential Voyage au Pérou et en Bolivie and stole artifacts that are now displayed in Paris. In Peru, he fathered an illegitimate child with a mestiza, which means that in Gabriela Wiener's Peruvian family, issues of race, religion, ancestral legitimacy and the dynamics of colonialism manifest.
The novel mixes the repercussions of this with the author's decision to live in a polyamorous relationship with her Latino husband Jaime Rodríguez Zavaleta and a much younger, white Spanish woman. Together, they live in Spain, raising Gabriela's daughter, while struggling with jealousy and infidelity - the ruminations on sexual politics climax (haha, sorry) in a workshop about "decolonializing desire" in which Gabriela participates. And there is one more twist: A French Charles Wiener expert doubts whether Charles was actually Gabriela's forebear (to be fair, that scientist has a legitimate reason to do so).
So you might now claim that there is A LOT going on here, but it's of course a realistic depiction of a complex heritage that, as Valeria Luiselli points out, stands pars pro toto for many individual destinies on the South American continent. At the same time, I always struggle with novels that put a very strong (in my opinion: too strong) emphasis on the inescapability of heritage, trauma, class, etc. - it makes me think of Didier Eribon who, in my humble opinion, underestimates the importance of personal agency as a means of power. The power to make decisions is a key component of human dignity, and Gabriela Wiener is a woman with a platform who has a rather vast corridor to play out personal responsibility, which is a good thing. Then again, I'm German, so everyone born post 1950 has to believe that history is not destiny and that we hold power over our personal actions and thus our future - otherwise we would all have to jump off a bridge.
So no, Wiener's father and she herself are not unfaithful because some forebear was an illegitimate child, that's just nonsense. Also, the author's sex life is generally way less interesting than the text seems to assume, especially the decolonializing desire group is rather silly. The many thematic aspects around colonialism and mixed heritage don't quite come together, and sure, you might claim that's an aesthetic translation of the topical point, but still, many passages are a chore to read. Plus, this is a narrator with plenty of reasons to be angry, so why add throw-away sentences à la "how annoying, one of my ancestors was a white man" and make the narrator appear less than smart (I was under the impression that the real problem was that this person was a racist who came to plunder her country for his own gain and the glory of France, but okay *sigh*). I would have loved to learn more on the aspect that foreign, Jewish-born Charles tried to seek security and acceptance in France by exoticising and exploiting indigenous populations in South America.
While there is a lot to admire in the ideas and use of thematic concepts, I have to admit that I found the result to be rather frustrating.
You can listen to our discussion on the podcast (International Booker, Latinx edition) here (in German): https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...
December 10, 2021
Logra molestarme. Inquietarme. Sorprenderme. Luego, de nuevo, molestarme.
Tiene una prosa increíble, mordaz, tremendamente honesta, y es muy astuta al crear este libro, sobre los indígenas y la infidelidad, sobre el poliamor y el sexo, sobre lo que nos define y lo que hacemos para encontrarnos.
Me cae mal la narradora y luego bien, le admiro la apertura y luego la censuro.
Y por eso es que me gusta tanto.
Habrá que leerla y dejarse llevar, a ver qué sienten.
Este tipo de literatura me gusta. Bellamente redactada. Novedosa. Valiente.
Tiene una prosa increíble, mordaz, tremendamente honesta, y es muy astuta al crear este libro, sobre los indígenas y la infidelidad, sobre el poliamor y el sexo, sobre lo que nos define y lo que hacemos para encontrarnos.
Me cae mal la narradora y luego bien, le admiro la apertura y luego la censuro.
Y por eso es que me gusta tanto.
Habrá que leerla y dejarse llevar, a ver qué sienten.
Este tipo de literatura me gusta. Bellamente redactada. Novedosa. Valiente.
January 24, 2023
Leo a Gabriela Wiener desde hace años, en prensa, sus libros, difíciles de encontrar. 'Sexografías' pude leerlo gracias a los favores de una biblioteca que ordenaba, una fortuna. Huaco Retrato sabía que se las traería. Sabía que era capital encontrarlo, y compré una edición boliviana de Dum Dum editora en La Paz. El monte Illimani aparece en el libro, como en la ciudad de Bolivia. Y el libro es como el Illimani. Navega en territorios sin fronteras. La belleza de leer a Gabriela Wiener es su desnudez desfachatada, su transparencia, es dulce e incisiva, una mujer terrible. Y ese terror es belleza. Recomiendo leer este trabajo porque desafía cualquier límite. Y eso es exactamente lo que ella hace, dice y practica, consistente. Se puede confiar en ella. Gabriela traza caminos sobre cuerpos infinitos, todo es el mundo, el mundo es un viaje, la vida es amor, experiencia, arrojo, valentía y tiempo.
July 4, 2022
Empecé a leer y me desilusionó la narración de Gabriela. Oraciones cortas, cínica, sentenciosa, sin gracia, como si ella misma se desinteresara de lo que estaba diciendo. La postura en contra del hombre blanco y los huaqueros (su ascendencia de parte masculina) me pareció algo forzada en su pretendida intelectualidad y su distanciamiento sarcástico.
Entonces, el inicio del libro, gracias a las reflexiones sobre el post-colonialismo y la herencia doble y conflictiva de la autora, me atrapó en un principio, pero la trama fue degenerando en las relaciones amorosas de su padre, su tatarabuelo, y su propio intento de relación poliamorosa. En ese punto me perdió un poco (bastante).
Esta es mi opinión, claro, pero la verdad es que nunca conecté con la narradora. Seguí leyendo porque el tema en sí me resulta interesante (y es un libro corto), pero llegué a un punto en el que tampoco me importaba lo que esta prosa sin nada de especial tenía que decirme.
Entonces, el inicio del libro, gracias a las reflexiones sobre el post-colonialismo y la herencia doble y conflictiva de la autora, me atrapó en un principio, pero la trama fue degenerando en las relaciones amorosas de su padre, su tatarabuelo, y su propio intento de relación poliamorosa. En ese punto me perdió un poco (bastante).
Esta es mi opinión, claro, pero la verdad es que nunca conecté con la narradora. Seguí leyendo porque el tema en sí me resulta interesante (y es un libro corto), pero llegué a un punto en el que tampoco me importaba lo que esta prosa sin nada de especial tenía que decirme.
August 30, 2022
"La ficción del padre podría metamorfosearse en la no ficción de la hija escritora de no ficciones. La mentira impulsa la búsqueda de cierta verdad. ¿Cómo se llega a este punto?".
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Gabriela Wiener propone un juego autoficcional lleno de espejos que, con su prosa irreverente e incisiva, pone sobre la mesa la relación con el padre, el pasado y el presente rasgados por el colonialismo, la migración, los límites del amor, los árboles genealógicos de afectos y la experiencia transformadora del duelo.
Huaco retrato es un texto inherentemente híbrido: narrativo y ensayístico, así como profundamente personal. También creo que es una lectura contemporánea refrescante y necesaria, una de esas que siembra preguntas (no siempre fáciles o cómodas) en quien lee, presentando cuestiones que siguen haciendo eco incluso después de cerrar el libro.
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Gabriela Wiener propone un juego autoficcional lleno de espejos que, con su prosa irreverente e incisiva, pone sobre la mesa la relación con el padre, el pasado y el presente rasgados por el colonialismo, la migración, los límites del amor, los árboles genealógicos de afectos y la experiencia transformadora del duelo.
Huaco retrato es un texto inherentemente híbrido: narrativo y ensayístico, así como profundamente personal. También creo que es una lectura contemporánea refrescante y necesaria, una de esas que siembra preguntas (no siempre fáciles o cómodas) en quien lee, presentando cuestiones que siguen haciendo eco incluso después de cerrar el libro.
January 3, 2022
Esperaba mucho más desarrollo de ideas sobre el racismo en el Perú a partir de las propuestas sobre colonialismo y huacos.
April 27, 2023
Huaco retrato es una novela en la que la narradora y protagonista es también Gabriela Wiener, dejando abierta a interpretación si es autobiográfica o es ficción, con la libertad que da el género de la novela de inventar en torno a ciertos aspectos reales. En mi caso, he elegido no saber.
Lo más importante es que el resultado es una excelente narración, con una muy buena historia, contada por una narradora provocadora, que incursiona en muchas cuestiones controvertidas: colonización, racismo, criterios de belleza (e importancia de la belleza), sexualidad, extranjeridad y alteridad. Y lo hace alternando un lenguaje desafiante con las dudas ante las contradicciones internas que percibe.
¿Cuál es la comprensión más justa?: De la historia, de los vínculos culturales, del valor de la modernidad. ¿Es mejor el desprecio abierto o las actitudes políticamente correctas, y tal vez un poco forzadas? ¿Amor libre o celos? ¿Las castas raciales, las castas sociales?
Y GH es implacable; con lo que ve y consigo misma, y construye una narración que por momentos me generó el deseo de enojarme y discutir con la narradora, con su brutal honestidad. Y un cierre en el que el deseo se traslada a la creación de realidad, en literatura.
Una lectura muy recomendable.
Lo más importante es que el resultado es una excelente narración, con una muy buena historia, contada por una narradora provocadora, que incursiona en muchas cuestiones controvertidas: colonización, racismo, criterios de belleza (e importancia de la belleza), sexualidad, extranjeridad y alteridad. Y lo hace alternando un lenguaje desafiante con las dudas ante las contradicciones internas que percibe.
¿Cuál es la comprensión más justa?: De la historia, de los vínculos culturales, del valor de la modernidad. ¿Es mejor el desprecio abierto o las actitudes políticamente correctas, y tal vez un poco forzadas? ¿Amor libre o celos? ¿Las castas raciales, las castas sociales?
Y GH es implacable; con lo que ve y consigo misma, y construye una narración que por momentos me generó el deseo de enojarme y discutir con la narradora, con su brutal honestidad. Y un cierre en el que el deseo se traslada a la creación de realidad, en literatura.
Una lectura muy recomendable.
March 2, 2023
Un libro fantástico. Imprescindible para todo latinoamericano. Una crónica en primera persona que deja pequeñito al estilo clásico de la autoficción. Lo supera con creces. De cómo la muerte de su padre desata una búsqueda genealógica e identitaria que le lleva a investigar sobre su tatarabuelo, un explorador judío-austríaco (Charles Wiener) y todas las contradicciones raciales y culturales que implica ese mestizaje, en un contexto colonizado que busca descolonizar, no sin sus propias contradicciones. Para ello, Wiener, la mujer sudaca, morena, oscura, racializada, bisexual y poliamorosa, explora en su entorno cercano (vive en España), en la historia familiar, en su propia familia no convencional (tiene esposo y esposa, una hija) para tratar de entender el por qué de todo aquello que habita en sí misma. Una profunda reflexión del ser en estos tiempos. Recomendadísimo.
May 13, 2022
“Es aterrador pero los celos sólo mueren con el cuerpo. No sé cuantas veces he tenido ganas de morir por liberarme de ellos”
Que inquietante 😬 y lo disfrute muchísimo. Una lectura muy valiente en la que Gabriela abre mente y corazón y estremece al lector con temas de colonización, sexualidad, poliamor, infidelidad y tantos otros. Me parece un libro novedoso, tan sincero que llega al cinismo pero no podía dejar de leer.
“Ser migrante también es vivir una doble vida”
Que inquietante 😬 y lo disfrute muchísimo. Una lectura muy valiente en la que Gabriela abre mente y corazón y estremece al lector con temas de colonización, sexualidad, poliamor, infidelidad y tantos otros. Me parece un libro novedoso, tan sincero que llega al cinismo pero no podía dejar de leer.
“Ser migrante también es vivir una doble vida”
August 8, 2022
La eterna historia de la dominación de los fuertes sobre los débiles pero con una prosa cautivante, con una gran impronta de la crónica, mezclado con experiencias de relaciones poliamorosas, celos, algunas certezas, pero sobre todo, dudas. Una gran obra.
October 2, 2023
An unusual memoir in which Gabriela Wiener combines research about her great-grandfather's life and work with reflections on her own life and work.
Wiener's great-grandfather Charles was na Austrian Jew who is known for his Latin American expeditions in the 19th century, shipping loads of Pre-Columbian artifacts from Peru and Bolivia back to France. He almost discovered Machu Pichu too. But he also left behind an illegitimate son, who became Gabriela's grandfather, seemingly without caring for the mother.
Gabriela herself lives in Spain and is known for her polyamorous relationship with her girlfriend and husband - a topic she has written about before in other auto-fictional works (her oeuvre apparently like that of Annie Ernaux), but which I had not read before picking up 'Undiscovered.' This was somewhat unfortunate as the parts about struggling with polyamory (she cheats repeatedly on both partners) I had difficulty to the reasons and motivations. Although clearly the recent death of her father affects her deeply.
The book is at its strongest when it compares blatant 19th century racism with much more subtle but equally present 21st century racism. Where her white great-grandfather Charles was the perpetrator of the former, Gabriela - with her Peruvian looks - suffers the latter living in Madrid.
Interesting and well-written, but I wished I had started with her earlier works and read chronologically.
Wiener's great-grandfather Charles was na Austrian Jew who is known for his Latin American expeditions in the 19th century, shipping loads of Pre-Columbian artifacts from Peru and Bolivia back to France. He almost discovered Machu Pichu too. But he also left behind an illegitimate son, who became Gabriela's grandfather, seemingly without caring for the mother.
Gabriela herself lives in Spain and is known for her polyamorous relationship with her girlfriend and husband - a topic she has written about before in other auto-fictional works (her oeuvre apparently like that of Annie Ernaux), but which I had not read before picking up 'Undiscovered.' This was somewhat unfortunate as the parts about struggling with polyamory (she cheats repeatedly on both partners) I had difficulty to the reasons and motivations. Although clearly the recent death of her father affects her deeply.
The book is at its strongest when it compares blatant 19th century racism with much more subtle but equally present 21st century racism. Where her white great-grandfather Charles was the perpetrator of the former, Gabriela - with her Peruvian looks - suffers the latter living in Madrid.
Interesting and well-written, but I wished I had started with her earlier works and read chronologically.
March 23, 2024
Something I have always wondered is whether a museum has a right to keep collections from explorers or artifacts that were stolen in the past. On one hand it is a fascinating insight to another culture, especially if it’s one you’ll never visit. On the other hand it is theft and a sign of colonial attitudes, which should be returned.
This question of heritage is one of the many themes found in Gabriela Wiener’s Undiscovered. The author, who is Peruvian, is browsing in a museum and finds artifacts from the explorer, Charles Wiener, who she believes is her great great grandfather.
The majority of the book consists of Gabriela Wiener tracing her heritage and trying to find the connection between the Austrian Weiner and her Peruvian roots. At the same time she is grieving over her father and is finding it hard to remain faithful to both her husband and girlfriend.
In her research Gabriela finds out that infidelity and children from these affairs is quite common in her family tree, Charles Wiener himself could have had affairs with other Peruvians as well, while on his quest to discover Machu Picchu and Gabriela does wonder if her lineage is traced from there.
Allegedly, Charles Wiener also bought a child from a Peruvian native, with the intention to display and educate it in the western way – this also ties up with the main themes of heritage and colonialism.
As a novel, Undiscovered hits on all points, writing is excellent, the themes all mix fluidly, there’s moments which range from enlightening to unsettling (I’m referring more to the scenes involving human zoos and child indoctrination). I also liked how the autobiographical bits had light fictional touches. Another highlight from this year’s International Booker Longlist.
This question of heritage is one of the many themes found in Gabriela Wiener’s Undiscovered. The author, who is Peruvian, is browsing in a museum and finds artifacts from the explorer, Charles Wiener, who she believes is her great great grandfather.
The majority of the book consists of Gabriela Wiener tracing her heritage and trying to find the connection between the Austrian Weiner and her Peruvian roots. At the same time she is grieving over her father and is finding it hard to remain faithful to both her husband and girlfriend.
In her research Gabriela finds out that infidelity and children from these affairs is quite common in her family tree, Charles Wiener himself could have had affairs with other Peruvians as well, while on his quest to discover Machu Picchu and Gabriela does wonder if her lineage is traced from there.
Allegedly, Charles Wiener also bought a child from a Peruvian native, with the intention to display and educate it in the western way – this also ties up with the main themes of heritage and colonialism.
As a novel, Undiscovered hits on all points, writing is excellent, the themes all mix fluidly, there’s moments which range from enlightening to unsettling (I’m referring more to the scenes involving human zoos and child indoctrination). I also liked how the autobiographical bits had light fictional touches. Another highlight from this year’s International Booker Longlist.
July 17, 2023
Me gustó mucho descubrir los cuestionamientos que hace la autora al racismo, a la identidad, al amor, a la sexualidad, a la maternidad y no maternidad, al duelo, a la infidelidad, a no seguir acuerdos, a la pérdida como individuos y sobre todo, lo mucho que me hizo pensar y cuestionar sobre estos temas en mi vida.
4.5 ⭐️
4.5 ⭐️
November 6, 2022
Libro perteneciente a la categoría: Mmmm, algo así es más o menos lo que yo quisiera hacer.
March 31, 2024
Not my jam, sadly. I think there’s a lot of interesting concepts especially regarding bodies & colonization and in a way she is sort of excavating her own existence and familial history like her ancestor ‘discovered’ Peru & its culture for a European white audience. But for me the fragmented nature here didn’t let me connect and I felt it tried to do a bit too much in such a short amount of time.
April 9, 2024
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.
Longlisted for the 2024 PEN America Translation Prize
Longlisted for the 2024 International Booker, the judges' citation reading:
Undiscovered is Julia Sanches's translation of Gabriela Wiener's Huaco retrato, which would transate Huaco Portrait. A pet whinge of mine is why English publishers don't just translate the title and interesting to see the author address this is an interview linked below:
This is an autofictional novel (see later) and opens with the author/narrator, a Peruvian living in Spain, visiting the Musee du Quai Branly looking at a collection of Huaco portrait pots removed from Peru in the 19th century by her great-grandfather Charles Wiener:
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.
My reflection in the display case mixes with the outlines of these figures with brown skin, eyes like small, bright wounds, and polished bronze noses and cheekbones identical to mine, forming a solemn, naturalist composition. A great-great-grandfather is just a relic in a person's life, unless the man in question took the not-insignificant sum of four thousand pre-Columbian artifacts to Europe. And his greatest achievement was that he didn't find Machu Picchu, though he came close.
The Musee du Quai Branly is in the 7th arrondissement, right in the center of an old quay of the same name. It's one of those European museums that houses large collections of non-Western art from the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. In other words, a very pretty museum built on something very ugly. It's like someone thought that painting the ceiling with Aboriginal art and sticking a few palm trees in the corridor would help us feel at home and forget that everything in this place should be thousands of kilometers away from here. Including me.
Charles Wiener left a embryonic child behind, fathered with a local woman, from whom the narrator is descended, but also took a local boy with him back to France, purchased from his alcoholic mother, to prove that a good education could civilise the seemingly backwards people.
The author's immediate assertion on Wiener is that man - cruel, violently racist, and blinkered by his Eurocentrism - has nothing to do with who I am today, no matter how much my family has chosen to glorify him.
But the death of her father, and a return trip to Peru, lead to her digging more into the history - e.g. discovering that Charles Wiener, although ultimately a naturalised Frenchman was in fact an Austrian Jew, struggling for acceptance and citizenship at the time of his trip to South America, and the trip also leads to a rupture in her own polyamorous relationship. Some of the biographical evidence also leads some to question the reliability of her family story that they are descended from the explorer.
She starts to question her own choices - in a relationship with a Latino man but also a white woman - such as why she is so offended that Spanish people often assume she is a cleaner rather than a journalist:
Why do I also think domestic labor is worth less than that of a journalist who writes for El Pais? Is it because it reminds me of my racialization, of the race that has been and will always be a measure of who I am? Because it hurts to be shoved back inside the pigeonhole in their heads.
And as she reads episodes from his Pérou Et Bolivie, alongside the strong differences she also sees, relucantly, the similarities with Charles, who was more of a writer masquerading as an explorer and archeologist, rather than an explorer who can write:
Wiener really is a fluid narrator, a chronicler of minor details and excesses, the kind of storyteller who knows when to set aside principles and literary convention for the sake of hook-ing his readers, who doesn't think twice before using whatever's within reach to spice up his adventures, changing the rules of the game in a context where he really shouldn't be taking it that far. He is also, 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.
On the other hand, maybe he'd have felt more comfortable in an era when the truth has lost its cachet. He wouldn't have felt that cold patch of sweat on his lower back whenever someone asked him to defend something as flimsy as a conviction.
At the same time, I can't help but identify with his awful habit of meddling with reality when reality falls short, of constantly using his own experience as a yardstick. I sympathize with video editors. His self-portrait—of a narcissist obsessed with his own fantasy of success—is so indecent that he doesn't even have to expose himself. I can't count the times I've been asked about the nakedness of my work, since I am always my own subject, only to send in an answer that makes me sound even more insufferable.
Far from perfect. As with many of the books on this year's International Booker list, this is a (perhaps too) fragmentary tale, and the judges do seem to have a puerile fascination with sex - although here both features are in fact key to the text, with sex key to Wiener's previous best-known work being her Sexographies and her account her providing more questions than answers. And as I've commented on previous International Booker lists, "family biography tends to be of disproportionate interest to those in the family". Nevertheless one of the stronger entries on a weak list - 3.5 stars.
Profile of book and author in the NY Times and in Electric Literature.
Longlisted for the 2024 PEN America Translation Prize
Longlisted for the 2024 International Booker, the judges' citation reading:
‘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.’
Undiscovered is Julia Sanches's translation of Gabriela Wiener's Huaco retrato, which would transate Huaco Portrait. A pet whinge of mine is why English publishers don't just translate the title and interesting to see the author address this is an interview linked below:
I proposed to all my editors that the original title be kept—as a decolonizing agent it’s my job to defend the identity and original dignity of my book. Some listened, while others either half listened or not at all, following commercial criteria. Others, like HarperCollins, convinced me with the best reasoning. From what they tell me, the one who came up with Undiscovered was Juan Mila, my editor. And I liked it for the same reasons you do, because I saw an ambiguity in everything yet to be discovered but also in what cannot and will not be discovered, what is impossible to discover. At least in the translation in my head, although in English, it may not be so ambiguous.
This is an autofictional novel (see later) and opens with the author/narrator, a Peruvian living in Spain, visiting the Musee du Quai Branly looking at a collection of Huaco portrait pots removed from Peru in the 19th century by her great-grandfather Charles Wiener:
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.
My reflection in the display case mixes with the outlines of these figures with brown skin, eyes like small, bright wounds, and polished bronze noses and cheekbones identical to mine, forming a solemn, naturalist composition. A great-great-grandfather is just a relic in a person's life, unless the man in question took the not-insignificant sum of four thousand pre-Columbian artifacts to Europe. And his greatest achievement was that he didn't find Machu Picchu, though he came close.
The Musee du Quai Branly is in the 7th arrondissement, right in the center of an old quay of the same name. It's one of those European museums that houses large collections of non-Western art from the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. In other words, a very pretty museum built on something very ugly. It's like someone thought that painting the ceiling with Aboriginal art and sticking a few palm trees in the corridor would help us feel at home and forget that everything in this place should be thousands of kilometers away from here. Including me.
Charles Wiener left a embryonic child behind, fathered with a local woman, from whom the narrator is descended, but also took a local boy with him back to France, purchased from his alcoholic mother, to prove that a good education could civilise the seemingly backwards people.
The author's immediate assertion on Wiener is that man - cruel, violently racist, and blinkered by his Eurocentrism - has nothing to do with who I am today, no matter how much my family has chosen to glorify him.
But the death of her father, and a return trip to Peru, lead to her digging more into the history - e.g. discovering that Charles Wiener, although ultimately a naturalised Frenchman was in fact an Austrian Jew, struggling for acceptance and citizenship at the time of his trip to South America, and the trip also leads to a rupture in her own polyamorous relationship. Some of the biographical evidence also leads some to question the reliability of her family story that they are descended from the explorer.
She starts to question her own choices - in a relationship with a Latino man but also a white woman - such as why she is so offended that Spanish people often assume she is a cleaner rather than a journalist:
Why do I also think domestic labor is worth less than that of a journalist who writes for El Pais? Is it because it reminds me of my racialization, of the race that has been and will always be a measure of who I am? Because it hurts to be shoved back inside the pigeonhole in their heads.
And as she reads episodes from his Pérou Et Bolivie, alongside the strong differences she also sees, relucantly, the similarities with Charles, who was more of a writer masquerading as an explorer and archeologist, rather than an explorer who can write:
Wiener really is a fluid narrator, a chronicler of minor details and excesses, the kind of storyteller who knows when to set aside principles and literary convention for the sake of hook-ing his readers, who doesn't think twice before using whatever's within reach to spice up his adventures, changing the rules of the game in a context where he really shouldn't be taking it that far. He is also, 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.
On the other hand, maybe he'd have felt more comfortable in an era when the truth has lost its cachet. He wouldn't have felt that cold patch of sweat on his lower back whenever someone asked him to defend something as flimsy as a conviction.
At the same time, I can't help but identify with his awful habit of meddling with reality when reality falls short, of constantly using his own experience as a yardstick. I sympathize with video editors. His self-portrait—of a narcissist obsessed with his own fantasy of success—is so indecent that he doesn't even have to expose himself. I can't count the times I've been asked about the nakedness of my work, since I am always my own subject, only to send in an answer that makes me sound even more insufferable.
Far from perfect. As with many of the books on this year's International Booker list, this is a (perhaps too) fragmentary tale, and the judges do seem to have a puerile fascination with sex - although here both features are in fact key to the text, with sex key to Wiener's previous best-known work being her Sexographies and her account her providing more questions than answers. And as I've commented on previous International Booker lists, "family biography tends to be of disproportionate interest to those in the family". Nevertheless one of the stronger entries on a weak list - 3.5 stars.
Profile of book and author in the NY Times and in Electric Literature.
August 10, 2025
Me ha sacudido entero. No solo por todas las reflexiones sobre el colonialismo y el racismo que me han dado una buena hostia en la cara, sino por la relación con el cuerpo. Hacía tiempo que no me sentía así de acompañado al ver que hay heridas compartidas sobre cómo nos percibimos, que tenemos a un policía canónico y patriarcal dentro y que ese dolor seguramente nos acompañe toda la vida.
Gabriela Wiener me voy a leer todo lo que escribas. Gracias por ponerle alcohol y después una venda para que supure.
"He deseado en las mujeres lo que quería en mí", "quiero cercernarme al patriarca que me habita", "el cuerpo nacido marginal incomoda y se sienta marginado; no le cree a nadie y menos al amor"
Gabriela Wiener me voy a leer todo lo que escribas. Gracias por ponerle alcohol y después una venda para que supure.
"He deseado en las mujeres lo que quería en mí", "quiero cercernarme al patriarca que me habita", "el cuerpo nacido marginal incomoda y se sienta marginado; no le cree a nadie y menos al amor"
March 15, 2024
While written in a somewhat flat journalistic style, Wiener's book covers a lot of ground that I hold dear in my both personal and academic life. Speaking of personal, Wiener does raise a point or rather sets a problem about how to decolonize one's desire. It's only a small portion of the whole text, but it is an issue that I grapple with in my own life - how to re-educate one's desire and move from the set patterns (that have long racist, sexist, normative, etc.) histories. Wiener resolves it rather too quickly and too neatly but nevertheless, I appreciate the attempt.
January 6, 2022
tiene partes que me han obsesionado.... tanto....
por FIN solo soy una chica narrrando sus vicencias y angustias....
ON POINT charles wiener....
ON POINT sentirse fuera del poliamor
ON POINT no ir a clase de ceramica para superar traumas cos you are not white... sin embargo me sigue pareciendo apealling,,,,, por q sera..
por FIN solo soy una chica narrrando sus vicencias y angustias....
ON POINT charles wiener....
ON POINT sentirse fuera del poliamor
ON POINT no ir a clase de ceramica para superar traumas cos you are not white... sin embargo me sigue pareciendo apealling,,,,, por q sera..
December 30, 2021
Con su aparición en un listado de los 50 mejores libros del 2021 que publicó recientemente El País como única y vaga -al momento que lo abrí para iniciar su lectura, no recordaba nada más- referencia, empecé la lectura de “Huaco retrato” seducido por la levedad de su volumen y por la incierta idea de que trataba de una especie de diario de duelo como una manera de reparación por la muerte del padre de la autora.
El segundo capítulo del libro parecía confirmar mi dudosa creencia, cuando Gabriela Weiner deambulaba por el aeropuerto Barajas buscando vuelo trasatlántico para acudir al llamado de su familia, que le anunciaba la inminente muerte de su padre, víctima de un cáncer. Cuando arribó a casa, ya no tenía padre, pero sí un puñado de cosas que le legó, entre ellas, su teléfono y “el famoso libro escrito por Charles Weiner”.
Páginas más adelante intuí que la historia que nos contaba Gabriela podría tomar otros rumbos diferentes a un testimonial doloroso y desconsolado sobre la vida y la muerte de su progenitor. Entre la hojeada al apéndice del libro y el momento en que se decide encender el teléfono de su padre para indagar sobre la mujer con la que su padre “mantuvo una relación paralela y clandestina de más de treinta años y otra hija fuera del matrimonio”, a la crónica que yo esperaba, le brotaron otros derroteros.
Nunca había leído a Gabriela Weiner (1975-), peruana de Lima, periodista, dramaturga, poeta, creadora de performances literarios, militante activa en el feminismo, autora de libros sobre su embarazo o sus memorias sexuales, de crónicas e investigaciones periodísticas, relatos autobiográficos y poemarios, Gabriela es, por lo que ahora sé, una reconocida cronista, Premio Nacional de Periodismo de su país y todo un personaje por su vida privada, que no lo es tanto.
Todas las historias de familia son interesantes, solo se requiere de contar con el cronista adecuado. “Huaco retrato” resultó, sí, en parte crónica, especie de diario de duelo, que escribe Gabriela Weiner como parte del desconsuelo provocado por la muerte de su padre, pero es también pretexto para sumergirse en la búsqueda sobre sus orígenes y la influencia que ejercen estos sobre su vida, pero a la vez, también, un relato sobre una crisis en su relación poliamorosa, producto de una infidelidad.
Charles Weiner es un explorador austríaco, especie de Indiana Jones que escribió un libro sobre el Perú, país donde expolió, durante sus andanzas arqueológicas, una colección de más de 4 mil piezas de cerámica prehispánica que se exponen en un museo parisino, y que durante su paso por el Perú dejó un hijo bastardo, bisabuelo de Gabriela.
Un Huaco retrato es una pieza de cerámica que busca representar lo más fielmente posible el rostro de un indígena. Para Gabriela, un Huaco retrato es la foto carnet prehispánica. Escribe que de tan realista, al ver uno, es para muchos “como mirarnos en el espejo roto de los siglos”.
“Huaco retrato” me resultó una especie de artificio literario muy atractivo, con el que Gabriela elabora un equilibrado juego de espejos que parecen ocultar una parte de la imagen que posa frente a ellos; es un relato de autoficción o de no ficción que utiliza Weiner para escribir sobre temas serios como la historia de expoliación y depredación que sufrió el continente latinoamericano, a la vez que nos cuenta significativas e íntimas historias personales y familiares, llenas de celos e infidelidades, pero eso sí, escritas con humor, sarcasmo e irreverencia, que hace de su lectura, una experiencia agradable. ¡Te leo!
March 13, 2024
I have read better memoirs than this and I found the subject matter more interesting and engaging than the writing or the memoir itself. Undiscovered opens with the author walking through a Charles Wiener exhibition and explains that he was a European colonizer than came to Peru many decades ago and that she is one of his Peruvian descendants. Through the memoir she tries to reckon with the fact that her own ancestor was a colonizer and profited of the extermination and theft of a lot of Peruvian culture without acknowledging its importance.
I really enjoyed the sections where she was hunting through her family tree and getting in touch with Charles Wiener historians, especially looking through the birth certificates and connecting the dots. It was really fascinating seeing her uncover parts of her family tree and uncover secrets she didn't know about some of the documents.
The memoir is quite all over the place a little bit as it also touches on the fact that her father dies right at the beginning and so some bits touch on grief and mourning, but I think when it was muddled in with the rest of the topics in the memoir it didn't have the emotional impact it should have. Similarly it goes off on tangents about her relationships, polyamory and romantic rejections which I wanted to feel a lot more connected to, but didn't. I don't want to say it was the translation because I adore Julia Sanches's work, but there didn't seem to be a cohesion between all of the themes in the memoir and so I struggled to really emotionally engage with a lot of aspects of it.
I still enjoyed the bits about family and colonialism and Peruvian history but overall it's not one of my favourite memoirs. Nona Fernandez's Voyager is a an example of a memoir where the writing and the topics work together so well but unfortunately for me in this one it didn't.
I really enjoyed the sections where she was hunting through her family tree and getting in touch with Charles Wiener historians, especially looking through the birth certificates and connecting the dots. It was really fascinating seeing her uncover parts of her family tree and uncover secrets she didn't know about some of the documents.
The memoir is quite all over the place a little bit as it also touches on the fact that her father dies right at the beginning and so some bits touch on grief and mourning, but I think when it was muddled in with the rest of the topics in the memoir it didn't have the emotional impact it should have. Similarly it goes off on tangents about her relationships, polyamory and romantic rejections which I wanted to feel a lot more connected to, but didn't. I don't want to say it was the translation because I adore Julia Sanches's work, but there didn't seem to be a cohesion between all of the themes in the memoir and so I struggled to really emotionally engage with a lot of aspects of it.
I still enjoyed the bits about family and colonialism and Peruvian history but overall it's not one of my favourite memoirs. Nona Fernandez's Voyager is a an example of a memoir where the writing and the topics work together so well but unfortunately for me in this one it didn't.
January 21, 2022
A poco que nos remontemos en el árbol genealógico, todos encontraremos a algún cabrón con pintas y a alguna víctima. Considerar cómo se siente uno en relación con esa herencia me parece que tiene un interés limitado (lo cual no quiere decir que no haya deudas que saldar ni responsabilidades que asumir, en un plano no literario). Todo lo fascinante que me parece la historia de Karl / Charles Wiener, con sus propias contradicciones, semejantes a las de la autora, me aburren los cuestionamientos sentimentales de la relación poliamorosa de esta —y, en cierto modo, de sus padres—. Hay una analogía entre ambos asuntos, lo cual evita que el relato se desagregue por completo, pero ¿hasta qué punto esa analogía se traduce en conocimiento? ¿Qué semejanza existe entre el europeo que preña y abandona a una indígena (quizá no exactamente una indígena, pero pido venia para simplificar) y la escritora peruana que tiene una pareja blanca? ¿Qué nexo existe entre el niño indígena (esta vez sin venias) comprado y trasladado a Europa «con fines científicos» y la migrante hispanoamericana que se afinca voluntariamente en España? Huaco retrato se contenta con señalar esos ecos tenues, de significación incierta.
Por otro lado, admito que tengo un problema –fruto de mi educación pequeñoburguesa, masculina y recatada— con la exhibición del cuerpo y de los afectos. No es que me incomode, pero tampoco me interesa, o solo me interesa en la medida en que se inserta en la Historia y en la sociología. La autora hace suyo un aforismo de Angelica Liddell que, además de ser flagrantemente falso, es muy definitorio de los planteamientos y de las limitaciones del libro: «después de haber escrito sobre una misma no queda más en el mundo sobre lo que escribir».
Por otro lado, admito que tengo un problema –fruto de mi educación pequeñoburguesa, masculina y recatada— con la exhibición del cuerpo y de los afectos. No es que me incomode, pero tampoco me interesa, o solo me interesa en la medida en que se inserta en la Historia y en la sociología. La autora hace suyo un aforismo de Angelica Liddell que, además de ser flagrantemente falso, es muy definitorio de los planteamientos y de las limitaciones del libro: «después de haber escrito sobre una misma no queda más en el mundo sobre lo que escribir».
April 21, 2024
dnf @50%
October 14, 2021
Leer a Gabriela Wiener ha sido una experiencia maravillosa que recomiendo con toda mi alma. Conocí su historia por un Podcast (Las Raras, también recomendado) donde cuenta su historia y experiencia con el poliamor. Desde entonces me interesé en su literatura y hoy devoré su último libro donde aborda a modo de crónica autobiográfica la relación de su antepasado huaqueador y el contraste de su historia con la propia de la autora, cómo su propia sangre puede contener rastros de esa colonización barbárica de distintos poderes europeos, que en el siglo XIX arrasaron con las diversas culturas prehispánicas de Latinoamérica. Como chilena, esta historia toca profundamente mis raíces también, y leer sobre cómo estos territorios fueron arrasados, expuestos y regalados a las potencias blancas, llevados también al extremo de ser exhibidos en zoológicos humanos en muchas capitales europeas. Una exposición abierta a la historia tangible del colonialismo, sus estragos en el pasado y también en el presente.
Este libro da para muchísimo análisis, también por el toque personal que la autora mezcla de manera muy interesante, temas como el duelo, la traición, el racismo, el poliamor.
Este libro da para muchísimo análisis, también por el toque personal que la autora mezcla de manera muy interesante, temas como el duelo, la traición, el racismo, el poliamor.
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