Undiscovered (2023) by Gabriela Weiner

Book Review
Undiscovered (2023)

by Gabriela Weiner

   Undiscovered is first up from the 2024 Booker International Prize longlist.  There is already an Audiobook out, and I put my hold in when the list was announced.  Weiner is a Peruvian writer who lives in Spain.  She was writing about polyamory before that was much of a thing and she works as a journalist. Undiscovered is an appealing work of auto-fiction about Weiner and her relationship with her real-life family founder Charles Weiner, a man who was famous in his day but is today remembered as the explorer who almost rediscovered Machu Picchu.   Undiscovered flips between narrator Weiner on a trip back to Lima to mourn the passing of her father and her life in Barcelona as part of a flailing "throuple"- Weiner, her cis husband and her lesbian/bi lover. 

   Much of Undiscovered deals with Weiner's unresolved feelings about race, her existence as a dark-skin, educated, professional-class woman in multiple societies where dark skin is equated with poverty.  She explores it in terms of her family background and her erotic desires.  Finally, she explores the actual truth surrounding her family attributing their genealogy to the famous explorer Charles Weiner, readers of contemporary auto-fiction will not be surprised to learn that all her explorations end in ambiguity.