Research Catalog

Title

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

Author

Fonseca, Carlos, 1987-

Publication

• New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
• ©2020

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

McDowell, Megan

Description

303 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

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." --

Uniform Title

Museo animal. English

Alternative Title

Museo animal.

Subject

• Museum exhibits > Fiction
• Museum curators > Fiction
• Photographers > Fiction
• Artists > Fiction
• Visions > Fiction
• FICTION / Literary
• FICTION / Hispanic & Latino
• Visions
• Photographers
• Museum exhibits
• Artists
• Museum curators

Genre/Form

• Fiction.
• Novels.

Note

• Remainder of title from from jacket.
• "Originally published in the Spanish in 2017 by Anagrama, Spain, as Museo animal"--Title page verso.

Language (note)

• Translated from the Spanish.

Call Number

JFE 21-2030

ISBN

• 9780374216306
• 0374216304

LCCN

2020934828

OCLC

1152981098

Author

Fonseca, Carlos, 1987- author.

Title

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

Publisher

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Copyright Date

©2020

Edition

First American edition.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Language

Translated from the Spanish.

Added Author

McDowell, Megan, translator.

Research Call Number

JFE 21-2030