Review
------
Praise for Optic Nerve
The New York Times Book Review, 1 of the 100 Notable Books of
the Year
Publishers Weekly, One of the Top Ten Books of the Year
One of El País's Best Books of the 21st Century
One of The Morning News Tournament of the Books Short List Picks
Bustle, 1 of 5 Books by Women in Translation You Should Read
This Month
“In this delightful autofiction―the first book by Gainza, an
Argentine art critic, to appear in English―a woman delivers pithy
assessments of world-class painters along with glimpses of her
life, braiding the two into an illuminating whole.” ––The New
York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
“Appealing and digressive . . . María’s store of information
about painters and their lives can make reading the book feel,
delightfully, like auditing a course . . . Consistently charms
with its tight swirl of art history, personal reminiscence and
aesthetic theories.” ––John Williams, The New York Times Book
Review
“A roving, impassioned hybrid of art history and memoir . . .
The pithy biographical portions of Optic Nerve are bracing
correctives to potted textbook histories . . . Treat the chapters
like stand-alone essays, each one enlivened by the delightful
variety and idiosyncrasy of artistic obsession.” ––Sam Sacks, The
Wall Street Journal
“Optic Nerve would be worth reading as an art history lesson
alone; its descriptions of great paintings are phenomenal, as are
its lives-of-the-artists anecdotes . . . With each chapter, María
finds a new artist to love, and, in doing so, accesses a new part
of herself. It's a pleasure to watch her do both.” ––Lily Meyer,
NPR
“Gainza’s long-awaited English-language debut is a provocative
novel that investigates the power, value, and emotional
significance that art carries, from the perspective of one deeply
curious Argentinian woman.” ––David Canfield, Entertainment
Weekly
“Gainza’s phenomenal first work to be translated into English is
a nimble yet momentous novel about the connection between one
woman’s personal life and the art she observes . . . There are
many pleasures in Gainza’s novel: its clever and dynamic
structure, its many aperçus, and some of the very best writing
about art around. With playfulness and startling psychological
acuity, Gainza explores the spaces between others, art, and the
self, and how what one sees and knows form the ineffable
hodgepodge of the human soul. The result is a transcendent work.”
―Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)
“Here, art is a trellis around which life knots and overlaps,
severs, climbs upward . . . Optic Nerve’s episodic
iridescence―the way each chapter shimmers with the delicacy of a
soap bubble―belies its gravity. Gainza has written an intricate,
obsessive, recherché novel about the chasm that opens up between
what we see and what we understand . . . a radiant debut.”
––Dustin Illingworth, The Nation
“Falling somewhere between essay and close personal narrative,
Optic Nerve reads like a museum. It encompasses countless styles,
eras, and characters, offering new stories and ideas for our
narrator to follow down winding hallways. Considering artist
legacies, Argentine culture, and the accuracy of perception,
Gainza paints life and art as adjacent forces; fabricated images
and stories become real, casting their shadows onto memory. At
one point, Gainza describes the narrator’s childhood home filled
with antique furniture, and the bathroom with ‘a pile of
Sotheby’s catalogues dating back to 1972, the shelves bowed under
their weight.’ The image serves as an unlikely metaphor for
Gainza’s book: built around everyday life but haunted by a
history of art stacked high in the corner, quietly shaping the
space where it sits.” ––Nikki Shaner-Bradford, The Paris Review
“A delightfully digressive reflection on perception, parenthood
and the restorative power of looking at paintings." ––Ángel
Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times, One of the Best Books of the
Year
"Optic Nerve is an elliptical, elegant debut that conjures
Rachel Cusk and W. G. Sebald and even Jenny Offill, but is also a
magic all of its own. It is mostly about an Argentinian woman
named María looking at and thinking about art, and sometimes
about her desires, or her family. I know you’re skipping ahead,
and honestly I can’t really explain, but trust me when I say that
it’s breathtaking." ––Emily Temple, Literary Hub, 1 of Our 50
Favorite Books of the Year
"As a reader, you truly find yourself spending time with Gainza,
someone who’s naturally agreeable and warm, a charming companion
that you’ll want to spend time with. As a whole, it makes a book
that’s both hypnotizing and comforting." ––Justin Souther,
Asheville Citizen-Times, 1 of 4 Great Summer Reads
“Is there anything more exciting than when art defies
categorization, resists genre, operates only within the
boundaries of its creator’s intentions? María Gainza's Optic
Nerve is one such piece of art; its words shimmer and shimmy
inside your head as it leads you to places you’ve never been, and
could only ever have imagined. Part autofiction and part inquiry
into the consumption of art, Optic Nerve is a vital read for
anyone who knows that seeing something isn't the same thing as
perceiving it, and that once you understand the distinction
between the two, entirely new worlds can open up, unconstrained
from the restrictions too often placed upon them.” ––Kristin
Iversen, NYLON
“My favorite book of 2019 (thus far), Optic Nerve is composed of
a series of vignette-like sections that each focus on a different
artist. Through the stories of Rothko, Courbet, Toulouse-Lautrec,
and others, the reader comes to understand something essential
about the novel's narrator, an Argentine art historian who has
built her life on the foundation of the work of the artists she
idolizes.” ––Cristina Arreola, Bustle
“A spellbinding novel. Gainza’s lambent art criticism shines
alongside a series of personal reveries and threnodies . . . An
impression of the way art insinuates itself into the
phenomenological jet stream of our daily lives, and the way it
attaches itself to all manner of quotidian and tragic moments.”
––Matthew D. Rodrigues, Hyperic
“One of the most difficult tasks in fiction is conveying the
aesthetics of a particular character. That’s precisely what María
Gainza has done in her newly-translated book Optic Nerve, which
follows the life of a narrator with an intense interest in art,
and blends observations on artists’ lives and work with events
within her own world.” ––Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“The unnamed Argentinian woman who narrates Gainza’s debut novel
loves, lives, and breathes art. Buenos Aires is her home, and,
afraid to fly, she becomes ly connected to the city where
she spends her life. Readers will become equally ly
connected to her mind, from where we view her world as a kind of
gallery walk, with memories becoming exhibitions, placed together
by theme or whim rather than by chronology. These crystalline
moments of her life are set off against stories from art history,
artists, and art becoming a mirror for self.” ––Ilana Lucas, Brit
+ Co
“Optic Nerve is an exploration of art history through the life
of a woman who’s living in the now, interweaving the stories of
past and present to create an enchanting, captivating read. If
you’re a lover of art or even just a lover of interesting prose,
do yourself a favor and pick up Optic Nerve when you get the
chance.” ––Callie Byrnes, Thought Catalog
Startlingly original . . . Both Gainza’s writing style and her
taste in art display a preference for understatement . . . One
senses a certain arbitrariness, a sincerity of taste that brings
to mind Borges’s literary enthusiasms . . . Rare and exquisite.”
––Maxine Swann, Los Angeles Review of Books
“The writing, rendered in translation by Thomas Bunstead, is
crystalline and fluent, and Gainza’s eye for detail, ekphrastic
or otherwise, is sublime . . . [Optic Nerve] is an open mind,
the atoms as they fall; if there is doubt, it is
tolerated precisely because it lives in those searing moments of
confidence, perception, and vision.” ––Lauren Elkin, The White
Review
“Gainza’s narrator is an Argentinian woman with a great interest
in art and she weaves in and out of anecdotes from her own life,
information about artists, and engagement with the art itself.
Its discursiveness is its greatest strength; the smooth movement
from one subject to the other is engaging and satisfying. Gainza
also has an ability to wrestle with the contradictions and small
lies that operating in the Art world, so to speak, produces.”
––Bradley Babendir, Chicago Review of Books
“The driving force behind Optic Nerve’s roving, elusive
structure is Gainza’s uniquely enchanting voice. She is masterful
at weaving together scenes from the life of her protagonist and
moments from art history such that the correspondences are both
explicit and subtle . . . [A] tremendously exciting achievement.”
––Wilson McBee, Southwest Review
“Berger-esque, Cusk-esque, Sebaldian, but of course a magic all
its own, this novel will delight any flexible, curious mind that
happens upon it.” ––Emily Temple, Literary Hub
"Part novel, part memoir, part art history, a neat description
of María Gainza’s English-language debut Optic Nerve is difficult
to pull off. What you can be assured of is this will be the sort
of book that readers will be recommending to each other for a
very long time. Optic Nerve is a hallucinatory trip into the
experience of being spilled out in front of a great piece of art.
It follows in the spirit of its epigraph from Lucretia Rojas:
'Just going to take a look at the painting, said Liliana Maresca
after her of morphine.'” ―Nathan Scott McNamara,
Hyperic, 1 of Our Top 25 Books of the Year
"A curiously fascinating piece of autofiction . . . Each
anecdote deftly draws the unassuming connections from art to
life." ––Thrillist, One of the Best Books of the Year (So Far)
“Optic Nerve, María Gainza’s English-language debut, offers a
subtly intellectual, yet relievingly unpretentious exhibition of
art’s most enduring qualities . . . Her first foray into fiction
(or autofiction), it is clear throughout Optic Nerve that Gainza
knows the limitations of language and the problems faced when
writing about something that can stimulate so visceral, so often
indescribable, a feeling. The fact that the book does not fail to
encompass those feelings, and makes even the reader respond in
the way the author does, is testament to both Gainza’s skill and
that of translator Thomas Bunstead.” ––Harry Gallon, Minor
Literature[s]
“A curiously fascinating piece of autofiction . . . The loosely
connected chapters are like short essays of sharply written art
criticism, bringing in real artists, their lives, and their work
as they apply to smaller moments in María’s life. From thinking
about Mark Rothko while her husband is in this hospital making
friends with a prostitute, to exploring Gustave Courbet’s
seascapes in relation to her strange, less cousin, each
anecdote deftly draws the unassuming connections from art to
life.” ––Reviews on Books
“[A] profound inquiry into the place and function of art . . .
The prose, in Thomas Bunstead’s translation, is restrained,
funny, by turns (and at once) luminous and melancholy. I was put
in mind of Rachel Cusk’s Faye trilogy, for this and for the
anecdotal, allusive structure. The text moves fluently between
art criticism and history, biography, anecdote, memory and the
imagined past.” ―Amy Sackville, The Guardian
“Part criticism, part autofiction, part meditation on the act of
seeing, [Optic Nerve] has much in common with the recent novels
of Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner and Olivia Laing. But it’s a highly
original, piercingly beautiful work, a book you’ll want to savor
. . . Optic Nerve is full of beautiful shocks. Like the critic
John Berger, to whom she has been compared, Gainza writes about
how we are never looking at just one thing: we are always looking
at the relation between things and ourselves . . . Gainza is a
writer who feels immediately important. I felt like a door had
been kicked open in my brain.”―Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Guardian
“As our narrator navigates her life, the reader builds a picture
of her marriage, friendships, estrangements, entanglements,
family grudges, and desires that feels at once spontaneous and
curated . . . Gainza writes a lingual picture of a woman who
walks the echoing halls of Western cultural history with the
familiarity of an initiate while maintaining a sense of
astonishment at the wonders of the everyday world . . . Erudite
and unusual, Gainza's voice evokes both John Berger and Silvina
Ocampo even as she creates something wholly new.”―Kirkus Reviews
“Optic Nerve is one of the best books I’ve read in years. How
did María Gainza pull off something so risky when it never reads
as anything less than delightful and engrossing? This is a book
that loosens the restraints on literature and gives us a new way
of seeing.” ―Gabe Habash, author of Stephen Florida
“In between autofiction and the micro-stories of artists,
between literary meet-ups and the chronicle of a family,
its past and its misfortunes, this book is completely original,
gorgeous, on occasions delicate and other times brutal. And this
woman-guide, who goes from Lampedusa to The Doors with crushing
elegance, is unforgettable: she knows too much even though she
declares herself scatter-brained and uncapable for modern life,
even though she only feels alive in front of a secret painting,
hiding somewhere in a South American museum.” ―Mariana Enríquez,
author of Things We Lost in the Fire
“Exceptional.” ―Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Dublinesque
“It is utterly unique how Gainza interweaves art into her book.”
―Cees Nooteboom, author of The Following Story
Read more ( javascript:void(0) )
About the Author
----------------
María Gainza was born in Buenos Aires, where she still resides.
She has worked as a correspondent for The New York Times in
Argentina, as well as for ARTnews. She has also been a
contributor to Artforum, The Buenos Aires Review, and Radar, the
cultural supplement from Argentine newspaper Página/12. She is
coeditor of the collection Los Sentidos (The Senses) on
Argentinean art, and in 2011 she published Textos elegidos
(Selected Texts), a collection of her notes and essays on
contemporary art. Optic Nerve is her first work of fiction and
her first book to be translated into English.
Thomas Bunstead is a writer and translator based in East Sussex,
England. He has translated some of the leading Spanish-language
writers working today, including Eduardo Halfon, Yuri Herrera,
Agustín Fernández Mallo, and Enrique Vila-Matas, and his own
writing has appeared in publications such as Kill Author, The
White Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is an editor
at the translation journal In Other Words.
Read more ( javascript:void(0) )