THE MUSEUM OF FOG

Galo Ghigliotto

Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead

“A museum burns in Tierra del Fuego. Like the roaring fires of old that gave their name to the territory, the installations have gone up in flames fanned by the wind in these extreme parts. A group of investigators—or curators or writers: we don’t know and it’s not that important—proposes to, and for the travellers ‘ready to trek hundreds of kilometres across the pampas to see it’, reconstruct the exhibition on display in its halls.

The discovery of ‘the incomplete book proofs of the first and only catalogue printed by the museum’, together with a few other pieces, allow them to mount a ‘partial, almost ghostly display’ that represents ‘the aura of the original exhibition of the Museum of the Mist.’” Jonathan Opazo Hernández

“Fog covers the landscape: the heart of the pampas, the rocky inlets of Tierra del Fuego and the Straits of Magellan. But in this amazing and disturbing novel, the mist also settles on the footprint of brutality and we’re forced to tread with caution across a land that ranges from delirium to real, brutal history.” Alejandra Costamagna

“We know by now the many different literary versions of Patagonia. None are like this. Ghigliotto drags us without cushioning to a sinister corner whose extreme isolation gives rise to an equally extreme impunity. Ever so slowly, in the shattered Patagonia curated by the Museum of the Mist, a genocidal impulse unfurls. This is a radical and turbulent reinterpretation of a territory.” Alain-Paul Mallard

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Galo Ghigliotto is an agronomist, poet and writer who holds a master’s degree in literature from the University of Santiago. He established Chile’s most important independent book fair, La Furia del Libro, founded the independent press Cuneta, and is now the director of the University of Santiago Publishing House.

Thomas Bunstead has translated novels by some of the leading Spanish-language writers working today, including Agustı́n Fernández Mallo, Bernardo Atxaga and Enrique Vila-Matas. His work has appeared in Granta, The Guardian and Vice. His translation of Maria Gainza’s “Optic Nerve” was shortlisted for the 2020 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, was a finalist in the 2020 National Translation Awards, one of two translations in Publishers’ Weekly’s Top Ten Books of 2019, and a New York Times ‘Notable Book’ of 2019. He has twice been a winner of PEN Translates Awards.