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"Ornamental is Juan's third novel, but it will be his first translated into English. It follows a scientist who recruits a group of volunteers for the trial of a new recreational drug that only affects women. Among them is "number 4," who becomes emotionally involved with first the scientist and then his wife, a well-known visual artist in the midst of a creative crisis. The scientist is oblivious to the atrocities his new drug will bring to the city just as his wife is oblivious to the superfluousness of the "ornaments" she has made her life's work exhibiting in galleries and museums: they've both gained prominence as "designers of artificial emotional states." But number 4's presence in their lives pierces their complacency, gradually undoing the many certainties they've accumulated in their position of social and economic privilege. Ornament invites readers to consider the points of tangency between collective, political histories and individual lives, along with the possibilities and impossibilities art offers as a field for examining evil"--