Undiscovered by Gariela Wiener

Peruvian fiction

Original title – Huaco Retrabo

Translator – Julia Sanches

Source – Personal copy

when the Booker International longlist came out, one of the names I recognised straight away was the Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener,. I reviewed her book Nine Moons around her pregnancy a few years ago. She is one of the many talented female writers from Latin America, although she has lived in Spain for several years. She writes columns regularly for a Peruvian paper and magazine and occasionally for El Pais. She has also worked as an editor. She is related to the Austrian French explorer Charles Wiener. This fact is what makes the starting point of this book. A look into her own family history.

My family doesn’t have a single photograph of María Rodriguez. We’ll never know what she looked like.The woman who inaugurated the Wiener lineage inPeru, who carried a pregnancy to term by herself and breastfed a half-orphaned boy, has been swallowed by the earth. Much like traces of an ancient world that vanish beneath the sand for years. There’s a science to gathering materials scattered across a region and salvaging whatever time hasn’t corroded in order to piece together a fleeting image of the past. Huaquear, on the other hand, is opening, penetrating, extracting, stealing, flee-ing, forgetting. Yet in that rift, something was implanted inside her and germinated far from the tree.

They know who Charles had slept with but there is no photo of her great great grandmother around.

 

The book starts while she is in Paris; she visits an exhibition of Columbian artefacts, plunder from a time before Europeans had been to Latin America. Some of the female statues she starts to look at she sees herself in them., But then is shocked when she sees these statues were brought back to Europe by her own great -great grandfather, Charles Wiener. She then goes down a rabbit hole of her own personal history but also her own family’s background as half Peruvian and European, a deep look into race and place. I loved a remark that was sent to her about her having a Peruvian face. A off the cuff but racist remark or a statement of fact not sure but it in a way is at the heart f her journey to find out about Charles, but also about the plunder and violence of that time for the natives in Peru. As Charles took the portrait vase, she looked back to Europe, and they ended up in Paris. He also left a son and the family line that led to Gabriela and her family line.

SINCE MOVING TO SPAIN, I REGULARLY MEET PEOPLE WHO tell me I have a “Peruvian face.” What is a Peruvian face, anyway?The face of those women you see in the metro. The face in the pages of National Geographic. The face of María who saw Charles.My face looks a lot like a huaco portrait. Every time someone tells me this, I picture Charles brushing dust off my eyelids as he tries to determine when I was made. Huacos are handmade pieces of delicately painted ceramics. Pre-Columbian, they come in a variety of forms and styles, tending to be either decorative or part of a ritual or funerary offering. They’re called hua-cos because they were found buried next to important people insacred temples known as huacas. But out of all the huacos, the huaco portrait is the most interesting. A huaco portrait is a pre-Columbian photo ID. Its depiction of an Indigenous face is so realistic that when I look at one up close, it feels as if I’m gazing into a cracked mirror of bygone centuries.

The comment she gets about her faces and her view on it

I really liked her other book. I think she is in the tradition of auto fiction writers. This is the problem here. For me, this is more a work of nonfiction than a novel. But it is an interesting insight into the dark secrets a lot of families can have in their background. What is at the heart of this book is the bloody past of Latin America when people like Wiener came and took so much history back to Europe. Most of the artefacts he got are from the area around Machu Picchu, although he never got there as it was years after the Europeans first found the city he was in Peru and was near the city so the pieces he brought is from Peru and the family history means that the pots in the Museum had a historical resemblance to her when she looked at them but then this unusual family connection and this brought to the fore the history and what it is like to be colonised and coloniser. A great piece of autofiction and goes down a rabbit hole of our family history. If you like annernaux ora book around personal family history, this is one for you also about growing up between being a native and being a coloniser. Have you read any of her other books ?  she has another around the sex industry.

Winston’s score – B solid book, well written, but is it a novel?