Diorama

After years spent outrunning her past, Cecília reexamines the case of a close family friend killed by a colleague and rival: her father. Cecília migrates from southern Brazil to California, assuming a new life as a taxidermist. Her temperament is ideally suited for the work of restoring once-living things and constructing dioramas of enclosed immobilized worlds. But when it comes to reconstructing her own history, Cecília's knack for composition frays. When news comes that her father suffered a stroke and she may need to venture home to see him before it’s too late, Cecília’s past can't stay fixed like a specimen behind glass any longer. Her story emerges, it stalks her, and becomes her natural predator. In 1988, as Brazil’s dictatorship fell and democratic rule returned, a beloved local congressman in Porto Alegre was assassinated. The prime suspect: Cecília’s father. Now, she threads the past and present, and reveals the secrets, lies, and taboo affairs that ignited the media frenzy and investigation of the murder. In sleek, arresting prose that has the suspense-filled edge of a true-crime thriller, Carol Bensimon’s newest novel cements her status as one of the most dynamic voices in contemporary Brazilian literature. Diorama is her fifth book, the first since she won the Jabuti Award, Brazil’s most prestigious honor for fiction, in 2018. Here, her narrative gifts are at their apex, fusing crime procedural, queer coming-of-age, and political drama. Bensimon constructs a moving model of memory, endangering our notions of what is or isn’t still alive inside all of us.