Review: "Undiscovered" by Gabriela Wiener

Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener
Translated by Julia Sanches
Published September 2023 via HarperVia
★★★

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. (loc. 87*)

We all have skeletons somewhere in the familial closet. Sometimes they're out on display, sitting at the dinner table—but Wiener's family skeletons were displayed more prominently than most, in European museums. Not their literal skeletons (this particular analogy is perhaps a little confusing, whoops), but the artifacts that Charles Wiener, an Austrian-French explorer, had looted from Peru and brought to France. Not long after he left Peru, a Peruvian baby was born bearing the last name Wiener, and in many ways it was this history that Gabriela Wiener's family in Peru was most proud of: here was their connection to history, to prestige.

For years my dad treasured this book with its dozens of costumbrista etchings of Indigenous life, keeping it stashed away in a special part of our library. Every time I tried to cozy up to it and linger in its pages, I wound up shutting it in horror. I just couldn't read it the way so many others did: as a fascinating nineteenth-century travel account. More than that, I couldn't brush aside Charles's vile assertions about so-called savage Indians. 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. (loc. 238)

In Undiscovered, Wiener sets out to learn more about Charles's travels in Peru—and what they might mean for her own identity as a Peruvian woman; as a Peruvian woman living in Spain; as a Peruvian woman living in Spain in a polyamorous relationship with a Peruvian man and a Spanish woman.

I think it's safe to say that Charles Wiener is the least interesting part of her story.

This is described as a blend of fiction and nonfiction, and I'm not clear just how much of this I'm supposed to take as fact—I read it primarily as fact with the exception of the sections in which Wiener imagines important moments in Charles's life, but I'm not sure if it's more interesting if that's the case or if there is a great deal more fiction blended in here. (And where do I hope that things are more true, and where do I hope that they are more fictional?) I realize I'm trying to build something out of pieces lifted from an unfinished story, writes Wiener (loc. 399), and in a way that feels accurate to this book, too: Charles's story is incomplete (he was not a big enough name that his whole life can be readily picked apart and examined), and her own story is still being written.

Much of the book is about unpicking colonization and what it means in Wiener's own life—again, as a minority woman living in Spain, with a family history marked by colonialism—and I'm fascinated and horrified by, well, a lot of it. (See the Wikipedia article on Expo 58—specifically, the section on the human zoo—for some of that; it staggers me to think that some of the people involved in that could still be alive.) The book may be reading for its discussion of polyamory alone, but it's far more interesting in the context of political and family history—and learning that truths you have held your whole life may be more complicated than you thought. I think I'm due for some more historical-political reading...

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are taken from an ARC and may not be final.