DIORAMA

A Brazilian woman navigates her way through the liminal space between life and death, countries, genders, friends, and people.

Cecília Matzenbacher is 9 years old when we meet her, bouncing along a dusty road in the backcountry of Rio Grande do Sul on the hunt for partridges. With her are her father, two brothers, and a shotgun that will soon play a significant part in Brazilian novelist Bensimon’s layered narrative. Young Ciça isn’t much for killing—of the birds shot from the sky she thinks, “They deserved better”—but she is fascinated by the natural world. In adulthood she becomes a master taxidermist, migrating to the U.S. to spend her days stitching animal skins into recognizable simulacra to populate the dioramas of Bensimon’s meaningful title. She brings secrets with her: Her father, a doctor turned politician, is charged with shooting a colleague and friend, João Carlos Satti, to death. Though she’s well regarded, Cecília’s life is a mess: She’s bounces from town to town, is in a marriage that seems unsalvageable, has a casual but life-changing affair with a young woman (“I make no mention of skinning carcasses, fleshing hides, stitching”), and keeps her distance from her Brazilian kin. But her travails are minor compared with the Satti murder inquiry, which unearths sexual secrets that shock the conservative town of Porto Alegre and threaten to destroy the Matzenbachers. “Don’t look at them,” her father says of the gawkers at the trial, quietly echoing Ciça’s offhand, earlier mention of why one should never look a bear in the eyes: “A bear that meets a human’s gaze always has to obliterate what he sees there.” It works with humans, too, which lends Bensimon’s final sentence in this existential mystery all the more power.

An allusive, atmospheric exploration of the secrets behind every family’s door.