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    Natural History: A Novel
    Natural History: A Novel
    Natural History: A Novel
    Ebook415 pages6 hours

    Natural History: A Novel

    By Carlos Fonseca and Megan McDowell

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    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 secrets of the animal kingdom—with camouflage and subterfuge—and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the nature of which remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision.

    Seven years later, after the designer’s death, 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 about the true history of the designer’s family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungles. As he follows this trail, the curator 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, creates miniature replicas of ruined cities. A former model turned conceptual artist becomes the star defendant in a trial over the very soul and purpose of art. A young indigenous boy receives a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, the curator realizes, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of the obsessed.

    Natural History is a portrait of a world trapped between faith and irony, tragedy and farce. An urgent and impressively ambitious novel in the tradition of Italo Calvino and Ricardo Piglia, it confirms Carlos Fonseca as one of the most daring writers of his generation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 14, 2020
    ISBN9780374719869
    Natural History: A Novel
    Author

    Carlos Fonseca

    Carlos Fonseca (San José, Costa Rica, 1987) es un escritor costarricense-puertorriqueño. Ha sido seleccionado por el Hay Festival como parte del grupo Bogotá 39, por la revista Granta como parte de su lista de los veinticinco mejores jóvenes narradores en habla hispana y por la Enciclopedia Británica como uno de los veinte autores jóvenes más prometedores a nivel global. Anagrama ha publicado sus novelas Coronel Lágrimas: «La ópera prima de Fonseca tiene la forma de un caleidoscopio verbal intrigante e inolvidable» (Ricardo Piglia); «Escrita con la pasión de la inteligencia» (J. A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia); «Un debut maravilloso» (Valerie Miles, The New York Times), y Museo animal, elegida novela del año por el suplemento El Cultural: «Un libro importante» (Nadal Suau, El Mundo); «Una de esas novelas ambiciosas que aparecen cada tanto» (Edmundo Paz Soldán, El Boomeran(g)). Su obra está traducida al inglés, alemán, francés, italiano, griego, turco y croata. Es profesor en el Trinity College en la Universidad de Cambridge. Su última novela es Austral.

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    • 5/5
      Thanks to NetGalley for my ARC.You will be underlining and writing in the margins of this book, its possible that you will not and that it just the way that I express excitement when I read something that is truly special. Natural History is this beautifully written gem - the writing is astonishing and it's a translated work! The original must just be even more mind blowing so its a big accomplishment for translator Megan McDowell too. There are stunning atmospheric dreamlike effects in the writing. I found myself putting down the book so many times to either mouth out loud or think out the lines I loved most or just sit and ponder on the descriptions. It has the Natural History museum, it has archives, it has animals and mystery and subterranean adventure and intrigue and man its puzzling and Dennis Hopper fits into it too! and to boot its chock full of wildly interesting ideas and insights. Natural History is a literary atomic bomb. So the story develops from the moment a curator at the New Jersey museum of natural history begins to collaborate with a famous fashion designer and they both have this common interest in animals and camouflage and so they begin to work on an exhibit. But what is the exhibit?! Who knows? It is all very obscure and slippery. After the designer dies some years later the curator finds the archive of the mysterious never completed exhibit and this is where things start to really get good its where the adventures begin. Then there is the boy who has visions of the end times. This novel is so timely. Like any great novel its a mirror a portrait of the world we live in now. It is so bold and confident. Its a daring work that will challenge you in the best way possible. I am looking forward to more translated work out of Carlos Fonseca. High recommendations here.

    Book preview

    Natural History - Carlos Fonseca

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