Natural History

From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic epic of art, politics, and hidden realities.

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. A defiantly contemporary and impressively ambitious novel in the tradition of Italo Calvino and Ricardo Piglia, it confirms Carlos Fonseca as one of the most daring writers of his generation.

“"The various characters' perspectives blur the line between memory and fantasy, and their charm will keep readers along for the very intricate ride...[an] innovative puzzle box of a novel packs a powerful punch."”

"A delight that serves up narrative twists at every turn of the page."

-- "Daily Beast"

"An elegant meditation on art, inconstancy, and hiding, with a deftly woven subtext of camouflage that emerges as the narrative progresses."

-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"

"Fonseca's challenging and transcendent novel offers a prescient message about media fabrications and the unreliability of history."

-- "Booklist"

"Jonathan Davis's intelligent narration is a wonderful vehicle through which to delve into this inventive novel...a quietly lush voice that conveys just the right emotional nuance...There's a hypnotic quality to Davis's narration...[and] listeners will appreciate his wise guidance as they navigate an intricate plot and piece together this multilayered story."

-- "AudioFile"

-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"

[A]kaleidoscopic novel...[that] invites reflection about the weight of legacies and about the masks that make up what we call identity."

-- "Alia Trabucco Zeran, author of The Remainder"

Carolos Fonseca was born in San José, Costa Rica, and spent half of his childhood and adolescence in Puerto Rico. At the Guadalajara International Book Fair in 2016, he was named one of the twenty best Latin American writers born in the 1980s, and in 2017 he was included in the Bogotá39 list of the best Latin American writers under forty. He is the author of the novel Colonel Lágrimas, and in 2018 he won Costa Rica's National Prize for Literature for his book of essays, La lucidez del miope. He teaches at Trinity College Cambridge and lives in London.Megan McDowell is a Spanish-language literary translator from Kentucky. Her work includes books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, and Lina Meruane. Her translations have been published in the New Yorker, Tin House, the Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, and VICE, among other outlets. She won a 2020 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her translations have won the Valle Inclán prize and the English PEN Award for writing in translation, and have been short- and long-listed for the International Booker Prize. She lives in Santiago, Chile.Jonathan Davis has received widespread critical acclaim for his narration in a variety of genres. He has won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration in 2009, 2011, and 2012, as well as being a finalist for an Audie in 2007, 2013, and three times in 2014. He has also garnered accolades from Publishers Weekly, USA Today, and AudioFile magazine.

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