Gabriela Wiener

'An intimate story from the family archive, a story that is also the infamous history of our continent' Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive 'Powerful and searing' Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream A provocative autobiographical novel that reckons with the legacy of colonialism through one woman's family ties to both colonised and coloniser In an ethnographic museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener is confronted with her unusual inheritance. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artefacts, the spoils of European colonial plunder. As she peers through the glass, she sees sculptures of Indigenous faces that resemble her own - but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener. In the wake of her father's death, Gabriela begins delving into all she has inherited from her paternal line. From the brutal trail of racism and theft that Charles left behind to revelations of her father's infidelity, she traces a legacy of abandonment, jealousy and colonial violence, in turn reframing her own struggles with desire, love and race. Seeking relief from these personal and historical wounds, Gabriela turns to the body and desire as sources of both constraint and potential freedom. Blending personal, historical and fictional writing, Undiscovered tells of a search for identity beyond the old stories of patriarchs and plunder. Subversive, intimate and fiercely irreverent, it builds to a powerful call for decolonization.

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.

Undiscovered quotes

Join the club