Diorama

Cecília Matzenbacher, the Los Angeles–based taxidermist who narrates this intriguing outing from Bensimon (We All Loved Cowboys), views her trade as “history, storytelling, allegory, spectacle.” Cecília’s credo could also describe Bensimon’s fragmentary and genre-blurring novel, which blends snippets on the evolution of scientific study with a tender coming-of-age story and tense political thriller. As a girl growing up in Brazil, Cecília’s life was upended in 1988, when her father, Raul, then a congressman, was accused of murdering his fellow representative and friend, João Carlos Satti. Now, pushing 40, Cecília learns that Raul has had a stroke. As she pieces together what happened all those years ago, she also grapples with her own marital problems—her husband is a frustrated musician who wants kids while Cecília does not—and reflects on how she turned to taxidermy to cope with the possibility that her father is a murderer, finding “comfort in the idea of repetition” at her L.A. museum job. The tangled memories, troubled relationships, and well-crafted depictions of Cecília’s museum dioramas all hang together in Bensimon’s skilled hands. There’s much to admire in this layered work. (Mar.)