Diorama - by Carol Bensimon (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

After years spent outrunning her past, Cecília reexamines the case of a close family friend killed by a colleague and rival: her father.

In 1988, shortly after Brazil reestablishes democratic rule, a state congressman is shot and killed in Porto Alegre. The main suspect: a close friend and colleague in congress, Representative Raul Matzenbacher.

Many years later, Cecília Matzenbacher, his daughter, migrates from Southern Brazil to California, where she finds work as a taxidermist. Her temperament is ideally suited to this type of restoration and the careful reconstruction of a world frozen in time. But as Cecília confronts her own history and the memories of the investigation surrounding her father, her knack for composition frays.

When news arrives that Raul has suffered a stroke and Cecília's chances to see him again may be limited, her past can no longer stay put, posed like a specimen behind glass. Her story emerges, the past stalking her present, threatening to derail the life she's made for herself in the United States.

In sleek, arresting prose imbued with the suspense-filled edge of a true-crime thriller, Diorama cements Carol Bensimon's status as one of the most dynamic voices in contemporary Brazilian literature and demonstrates her narrative gifts at their apex. Fusing police procedural, coming-of-age story, and family drama, Diorama is a moving mystery about how we remember what's passed, endangering our notions of what is or isn't still alive inside all of us.

Review Quotes

"A rare quiet thriller, meticulously crafted by Carol Bensimon as if it deserves its own wing in a natural history museum, with one display depicting the crimes from a childhood, another a present-day failing
relationship, and another the lonely life of an immigrant taxidermist. Novels in translation set in the U.S. tend to be a delight, and this book delivers. Plus, anything translated by Julia Sanches and
Zoë Perry is a must-read."
--Fernando A. Flores, author of Brother Brontë

"Bensimon extricates a deep line of questioning by situating the narrator's dedication to reconstructing the past alongside her commitment to a profession that constantly demands a form of scene-making . . . After all, everything is a construct."
--Stefania Chiarelli, Estado de Minas (Brazil)

"Diorama reads like a twisty crime thriller: elegant, incisive, and extremely propulsive. Cecília constructs a narrative diorama of a murder that defined her childhood, and subsequently her life, to explore the messy and lasting ramifications of violence and trauma."
--Harold Rogers, author of Tropicália

"Carol Bensimon has written a captivating philosophical thriller."
--Gladys Marivat, Le Monde

About the Author

Carol Bensimon was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1982. She is the author of the highly acclaimed novel O Clube dos Jardineiros de Fumaça, which won the Jabuti Award, the most prestigious literary award in Brazil, and was short-listed for the São Paulo Prize for Literature. She is the author of the novels We All Loved Cowboys and Sinuca embaixo d'água and of the acclaimed story collection Pó de parede. In 2012 she was selected by Granta as one of the Best Young Brazilian Novelists. Bensimon has a master's degree in creative writing from PUCRS and lives with her wife in Mendocino, California.

Zoë Perry's translations of contemporary Brazilian fiction have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Granta, n+1, The New York Times, Astra, The White Review, and elsewhere. Her translation of "My Good Friend" by Juliana Leite, published in The Paris Review, was awarded a National Magazine Award for Fiction and was selected by Amor Towles for a 2024 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction. Perry's translation of Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia won the 2024 Republic of Consciousness prize and the inaugural Cercador Prize, and was short-listed for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Julia Sanches translates works from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Her translations include Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, for which she won a PEN/Heim Award, as well as works by Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins. She is a founding mem