Name: Undiscovered
ISBN: 9780063256682

Gabriela Wiener

Julia Sanches

A Novel

Undiscovered

Sabrina D. 

My dad just died of terminal cancer in a hospital bed. And now, not wanting to flounder completely, I feel my way around the scattered isles and bottomless pits of his departure. They say that the most populous species in the deep ocean are bioluminescent. I think about this whenever I feel most in the dark. About creatures whose chemical reaction to gloom produces light. I tell myself I can do it, that I’m capable, that if all a mollusk needs is an enzyme and some oxygen to be able to glow and disorient its predators, why not me. 

Isn't that what writers do anyway? Pillage the real story and deface it until it shines its own singular light on the world? 

They've been stashed away in the basement ever since archaeology started being taken as a serious science, because they would make too much of a racket--like a mummy's ghost, or Juan, or my family name. What becomes of people with no exact provenance? What mass grave harbors them in life?

It kills me to be sexually unrequited. My unmet desires are exhausting and ache like nothing on Earth. I require too much sex to forget how little l love myself, how little I’ve been loved. But it’s a vicious circle, the excess drive, the high demand, the need for comfort sex—it’s not eroticizing, it’s off-putting. Against my better judgment I've delved into my trauma, and I think I can trace it all back to the moment I chose sex as my rebellion, my power, the one thing that was mine, the thing that would replace my self-love and the love of others, but especially the emptiness, which is why I can't handle the rejection of my grieving, lusting, naked body.

Excellently translated by Julia Sanches. A complex look into relationships, imperialism, mestizaje, sex, racism, and colonialism. I felt a lot of different emotions while reading this, but the mother’s letter on her sex life and the poem at the end solidified this as a five star read for me. 

Undiscovered A Novel