Natural history : a novel / Carlos Fonseca ; translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fonseca, Carlos, 1987- author.

Contributor:

McDowell, Megan, translator.

Standardized Title:

Museo animal. English

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Museum exhibits--Fiction.

Museum exhibits.

Museum curators--Fiction.

Museum curators.

Photographers--Fiction.

Photographers.

Artists--Fiction.

Artists.

Visions--Fiction.

Visions.

Genre:

Fiction.

Novels.

Physical Description:

303 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Edition:

First American edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020.

Summary:

"Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator's fascination with the hidden forms of the animal kingdom -- with camouflage and subterfuge -- and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the form of which itself remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision. Seven years later, after the death of the designer, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he finds within the archive a series of clues to the true story of the designer's family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungle. On the way, he discovers a cast of characters whose own fixations interrogate the unstable frontiers between art, science, politics, and religion: an aging photographer, living nearly alone in an abandoned mining town where subterranean fires rage without end, who creates models of ruined cities; a former model turned conceptual artist -- and a defendant in a trial over the very nature and purpose of art; a young indigenous boy who has received a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, as the curator realizes, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of obsession. Natural History is the portrait of a world trapped between faith and irony, between tragedy and farce." -- Provided by publisher

Notes:

Originally published in the Spanish in 2017 by Anagrama, Spain, as Museo animal.

ISBN:

9780374216306

0374216304

OCLC:

1152981098