Reading guide: Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Julia Sanches

Alone in an ethnographic museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener is confronted with her unusual inheritance. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Colombian artefacts, the spoils of European colonial plunder, many of them from her home country of Peru. Peering 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 Charles was responsible for, to revelations of her father’s infidelity, she traces a legacy of abandonment, jealousy and colonial violence, and questions its impact on her own struggles with desire, love and race in a polyamorous relationship.

Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian writer and journalist based in Madrid, Spain. Her books include Nine Moons, a memoir on pregnancy, and Sexographies, a collection of gonzo journalism about contemporary sex culture. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and has been translated into six languages. She is a regular contributor to El Público (Spain), Vice and New York Times en Español. Wiener won Peru’s National Journalism Award for her investigative report on violence against women.

Bartolomeo Sala, Frieze

‘Wiener deploys humour and sex throughout these pages, so much so that one might feel she is trying to merely provoke, as well as exonerate herself by dancing around the roots of her behaviour without really confronting it. However, far from being a cop out or an academic exercise, this meandering serves a clear purpose: conveying what it feels like to be an oppressed subject. Whatever the relationship between the author and the ethnographer – being a queer, brown, immigrant woman living in a xenophobic, patriarchal world means being continuously haunted by his spectre.’

NPR

‘Undiscovered has an appealingly raw, confessional tone, but its prose is highly polished. Sanches’ translation does not have an extraneous word. It is also—fittingly, for a book about post-colonial history—committed to retaining the original text’s Peruvian-ness… . Gabriela, who calls herself ‘the most Indian of the Wieners,’ cannot forget that: In Sanches’ exceptional translation, neither can anyone else.’

Electric Literature

‘A rollicking decolonial fact-fiction remix of … [Wiener’s family] histories, the life of her great-great grandfather, the explorer Charles Wiener, and how all this time plays out in her own body, and her current life, and polyamorous household in Madrid.’

BookPage

‘Even as it probes the author’s own family legacy, Undiscovered reminds readers of the importance of confronting the white-savior myths that form the basis of so much of what we call ‘history.’

Directly inserting herself into the story with a blend of fact and fiction, Gabriela Wiener also imagines parts of Charles Wiener’s life. But seeing as some of her additions can’t be substantiated as there was limited information written down about him, do you think this takes away from the legitimacy of her work?  

The discussion of polyamory is a significant part of the novel, as Gabriela is in a partnership with her husband and her girlfriend but she also conducts an affair. She wonders if her difficult situation is the result of her lineage, specifically her father’s infidelity. How much of this do you think is true? 

As Gabriela seeks to understand her own identity as a Peruvian woman living in Spain and her ancestor’s involvement in colonisation, how might that trickle down to her sense of self in regards to relationships and attraction?

In a New York Times article, it was mentioned that Gabriela’s ‘unconventional and kamikaze approach to writing has prompted critics at times to label her work not as literature, but as “testimony.” To what extent would you agree?

The book creates the impression to readers that it’s fiction, but considering how much personal history and experiences Gabriela is said to have included in the book, how much of the book do you believe is actually the result of a creative imagination and how much of it is fact?

Nine Moons by Gabriela Wiener

Sexographies by Gabriela Wiener

Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches