Diorama: A Novel

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 what and how we remember, a novel that endangers our notions of what is or isn’t still alive inside all of us.