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 secrets of the animal kingdom--with camouflage and subterfuge--and
she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the nature of which
remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship
marked by evasion and elision.
Seven years later, after the designer's death, 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 about the true
history of the designer's family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from
Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungles.
As he follows this trail, the curator 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, creates miniature replicas of ruined cities. A former model turned
conceptual artist becomes the star defendant in a trial over the very
soul and purpose of art. A young indigenous boy receives a vision of the
end of the world. Reality is a curtain, the curator realizes, and to
draw it back is to reveal the theater of the obsessed.
Natural History is a portrait of a world trapped between faith and
irony, tragedy and farce. An urgent 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.
