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    Optic Nerve
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    Optic Nerve
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    Optic Nerve
    Ebook162 pages3 hours

    Optic Nerve

    By Maria Gainza

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

  • This category-defying, English-language debut by Argentinian María Gainza will equally enchant fans of Rachel Cusk or John Berger, Jenny Offill or Leonora Carrington, Samanta Schweblin or Gaston Bachelard, Rikki Ducornet or Lynne Tillman
  • Optic Nerve has already been sold into nine languages, and nearly all will be published in simultaneous coedition with Catapult's US/Canadian edition
  • While Optic Nerve compellingly blends autofiction, humor, imagined memories, art history, fairy tales, and memoir, its central premise is the story of a girl (with no formal education) who seeks refuge from life in museums
  • The author, who herself has no formal university education, is a self-taught art historian and admirer of fine art from around the world. Her motivation for writing the book stemmed in part from the frustrations she felt as she “kept finding texts in museum brochures extremely boring, opaque, off-putting, so I developed this fantasy of writing an art guide that would be seductive and capricious”
  • Some of the most compelling passages of the book concern the emotions, memories, and fictions that works of art provoke. Gainza writes eloquently and immersively of the way the mind wanders and plays as it views and is moved by a particular piece of art. Her narrators—often merging in voice with the author herself—must leave gallery spaces to catch their breath after seeing a painting, or are swept away imagining the lives of those who commissioned the works of art centuries before, or are more obsessed with the rumored lives of the artists than the work itself. In other sections, artists' inspirations and microhistories (such as those of Henri Rousseau) are unexpectedly juxtaposed against the author's own (such as her fear of flying)
  • Translator Thomas Bunstead has also translated Eduardo Halfon's The Polish Boxer, works by Enrique Vila-Matas, Yuri Herrara, and more of the important Spanish literary voices in print today
  • For bookstores whose staff and customers appreciate NYRB, Europa, Sarabande, or Dorothy Project titles, and for stores with strong Spanish-American communities (the five states with the largest Argentinian diasporas include Florida, California, New York, New Jersey, and Texas)

    Bookseller praise for Optic Nerve

    "Genre is a silly constraint, and Optic Nerve by María Gainza is proof of that. Joining works like Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below, Enrigue's Sudden Death, and Browning's The Gift, Optic Nerve is art history and theory joined with the narrator's own stories. It is a giant painting on its own, made up of short episodes and sudden turns, beautiful and elegant." —Anton Bogomazov, Politics and Prose (Washington, D.C.)

    "Reading Optic Nerve feels far more like meandering through an art museum than like sitting down with a book. Its stream-of-consciousness leaning reminded my of Virginia Woolf, while its poignant reflections on art and how we absorb it reminded me of Olivia Laing in The Lonely City and John Berger in Ways of Seeing. Extremely visual, this meandering meditation proves again and again—and without feeling like it's trying to prove anything—that we can never look at things and keep them separate from us; to look is to create a relationship and to alter. Either pay extremely close attention to the speaker's ever-shifting mind, or let the whole book wash over you like a gallery. To sit in between the extremes will ruin Gainza's work for you." —Afton Montgomery, Tattered Cover Book Store (Denver, CO)

    "Optic Nerve is a stunning blend of fiction and art history, compulsively readable, and delicately connected. The narrator is not simply a woman who loves art and is knowledgable about its histories, but rather, she's a woman whose vision is entirely shaped by works of art, and for whom the lives and passions of the artists she loves are more re

    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCatapult
    Release dateApr 9, 2019
    ISBN9781948226172

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    Reviews for Optic Nerve

    3.5/5

    47 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This was neat, just sparklingly different from anything else I've read in a while. It's at least somewhat autofiction—the narrator, also named María, is an art critic in Buenos Aires, as is the author, and she's said in interviews that there are some overlaps with her life, but only some. Whatever the case, the book is a really well done set of very loosely linked chapters that take off from the idea of how looking at art, and thinking about it, intertwines with a person's life (and often changes it). She's a very good art critic to begin with, so her thoughts on the artists who are part of her stories—from Rothko and El Greco through more obscure and local painters—are really interesting, but also very accessible. There's also a very sub-subtext that caught my eye as a writer and researcher, which is where and how do you get to depart from the record and start building your own story? She's obviously researched these artists very closely, but there are also wonderful textural details about their lives that she could have totally woven in herself. Or not—I was toggling back and forth in Wikipedia and WikiArt to look at the pictures and artists Gainza was talking about, but at a certain point I (and probably most readers) will just sit back and take the narrative on faith, so those authorial nuances are always fascinating to me. Anyway, if you like looking at art and thinking about it past the moment when you're standing in front of the canvas, this is a lot of fun. Very fresh, I thought. And the translation, by Thomas Bunstead, is excellent.
    • 3/5
      Write about what you know is sometimes given as advice to those aspiring to authorship. Ms Gainza is already a writer and author and in Optic Nerve she has put what she knows to good use. She knows about art, she knows Buenos Aires and she knows her own family. These are the foundations on which her novel is built. Art being the central core. It's timely to remind yourself from time to time as you proceed through the lightly connected chapters that it is fiction you are reading not autobiography. The principal character, a young middle class lady, has much in common with the author.Each chapter has an artist and a picture at its heart. The picture prompts memories, connections and stories often of family members. There is a prevalent sense of nostalgia and of serendipity. Authors like W G Sebald and Iain Sinclair have an uncanny way of making unexpected and unlikely connections between places, people, memories and themselves in today's world as they wander through it. Ms Gainza operates in the same way but in a more specialised world of art history and appreciation. She visits art galleries in Buenos Aires, lights on a particular painting, understands it from an artistic point of view but then lets the picture into her mind to find pathways to prompt memories, feelings, stories. The pictures add to her understanding of herself.I've been to many galleries and seen many exhibitions. But I have not often stood for an extended period in front of one painting and tried to understand how the artist came to make it not only by skill but by intelligence and inspiration, and then gone further to feel how that painting has had an impact on me. What thoughts it prompted. Where it took me beyond the space on the wall it occupies. Maybe Ms Gainza will have inspired me to think a little bit more deeply next time a painting catches my attention.
    • 4/5
      2020 TOB--I really was at a loss on how to rate this book. It's not a long book yet it took me days to plow through. I'm not sure if part of my slowness was due to it being a translation or not. Anyway I decided on 4 stars because what a unique book. Each chapter discusses obscure information on an artist and those thoughts are woven into the narrator's story of her life. I couldn't always clearly see the connection but I think that is due to my limitations and not the fault of the author.I will be thinking and talking about this book for awhile but I don't know if I'll recommend it to me friends for reading.
    • 3/5
      Before I became pregnant I could be very persuasive, I'd do anything (anything) to get my way, but lately all of my husband's replies had been starting with the word "no."This novel, largely set in Buenos Aires, centers on a woman's life, through the paintings that she loves. Each chapter recounts one aspect of her life; an event, a friend, a character trait, interwoven with her encounter with a piece of art and some details of the artist's life. . . . Santiago had given me an autobiography to read, and he was planning on bringing it out to coincide with a retrospective of his work. Unaccountably curious, I read it in a single sitting, skipping over the boring parts, until I realized in fact it was all boring parts, one leaden sentence after another.The narrator's voice is engaging, I liked her right from the beginning. And what she chose to illuminate from each painter's life was fascinating. This novel reminded me of [[Rachel Cusk]]'s [Outline] trilogy, although this book has a more detached, cool feel to it, and decidedly less plot. I read with a laptop next to me, as all but a few of the paintings were unfamiliar to me and it was an enjoyable way to learn a little about South American artists. The observations and thoughts of the unnamed protagonist were insightful, although the lack of any plot or greater understanding of her life did leave me feeling that this book is a unmoored from any solid foundation.