Natural History van Carlos Fonseca is een gelaagd verhaal dat de unieke geschiedenis en artistieke opvattingen van een familie onthult.
Locatie: het verhaal speelt zich voornamelijk af in Latijns-Amerikaanse landen zoals Puerto Rico.
Natural History synopsis
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.
Recensie
Conclusie
Natural History is het meest interessant wanneer je leest over het leven van Yoav en Virginia en de verhandeling over kunst tijdens de rechtszaak. Als de vorm van het verhaal en de vertaalperspectieven anders waren geweest, had ik dit boek misschien beter gevonden.
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Boekgegevens
Titel: Natural History
Auteur: Carlos Fonseca
Vertaler (uit het Spaans): Megan McDowell
Uitgever: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pagina’s: 320
ISBN13: 9780374216306
Publicatiedatum: 14 juli 2020