Natural History by Carlos Fonseca is a multi-layered story that slowly reveals the unique history and artistic views of a family.
Location: most of the story takes place in Latin American countries like 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.
Book review
Behind every event, behind every story, there is something more: a so-called “negative history”. It is a kind of photographic negative of meaning, a historical shadow of what has been. Yoav pursues the invisible with his photography until he finds what he is looking for in the invisibility of a mining town.
Like Yoav, the main narrator also traces a history that has been invisible until then, namely Giovanna’s history. He works at a small natural history museum in New Jersey and has multiple conversations with designer Giovanna after being summoned by her. Giovanna uses her fashion as the art of camouflage and hiding; a way for her to express her fear of crowds. The main narrator is obsessed with her, and mostly with her fight as a ten-year-old against tropical disease, the meaning of her designs, and her fascination with Latin America. Yet he doesn’t dare to open the envelopes she left behind. At first.
What fascinates me the most in Natural History is the life of Virginia. Virginia had the scam of the century: a challenging work of art that leads to the trial she has long anticipated because “All art leads to trial. There is no art without judgment.” The art trial engaged my mind the most. Can a tragedy become an artwork merely because of its inspiration? What role does artistic intention play in this? And when is this intention being used as a mask?
Natural History is an ambitious novel. You need to read this book with your full attention. The sentences are long and there is a lot of cultural, political, and historical know-how included. Let Carlos Fonseca lead you deeper into the story until you discover the rich lives that some of the characters have lived. There are layers within layers.
While I liked the chapters about Yoav and Virginia – basically the middle of the book – I found the rest rather boring. Especially the first part about the main narrator’s encounters with Giovanna was lengthy and dull. And the later chapters recounting a journey that you’ve pieced together already were superfluous. The same goes for the number of narrators: what did Tancredo and Esquilín bring the story that Virginia or the main narrator couldn’t share?
Conclusion
Natural History is most interesting when it talks about the lives of Yoav and Virginia and when discussing different expressions of art during the trial. If the form of the story and the use of narrators had been different, I might have liked this book better.
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Book details
Title: Natural History
Author: Carlos Fonseca
Translator: Megan McDowell
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pages: 320
ISBN13: 9780374216306
Publication date: 14 July 2020
