“Undiscovered” - novel by Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener

Discovered a new Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener through her novel Undiscovered. 

The story is about her own surname, Wiener, inherited from her ancestor, the Austrian-French explorer and ethnographer Charles Wiener, whose life and legacy form the novel's central thread.

Charles Wiener was among the earliest European explorers to introduce Peru to French audiences, carrying home a trove of Indigenous Peruvian artefacts that now reside in museums in Paris. Yet his reputation is clouded by embellished accounts and dubious claims about his expeditions, raising unsettling questions about how colonial history was written.

Standing before these artefacts in a Paris museum, Gabriela Wiener embarks on an excavation of her own life. Descended from both the colonizer and the colonized, she confronts the contradictions of her identity as a woman with Indigenous ancestry who is often looked down upon by whites and even by lighter-skinned mestizos.

With courageous candour and honesty, Wiener interweaves history with autobiography, exploring racism, desire, love, infidelity and family through the lens of her own polyamorous relationships. The result is an intensely personal yet profoundly sociopolitical novel