# Natural History

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![Natural History](https://quivercdn.com/covers/farrar-straus-and-giroux/carlos-m-fonseca/natural-history_978-03-7421-630-6-e202d3ed.webp?v=2026-10-20%2004%3A04%3A09)

- Authors: [Carlos M. Fonseca](https://www.bookquiver.com/carlos-m-fonseca)
- Language: en_US
- Published: 2020-08-01
- Genres: Fiction: literary and general non-genre, Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general

## Description

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 realises, 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.

## Editions

### Natural History

- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- ISBN: 978-03-7421-630-6
- Pages: 320
- Published: 2020-08-01
- Language: en_US