Tag: maria gainza

Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve

*Follow our protagonist on her lovely, digressive stroll through memory, art and her own past in María Gainza’s Optic Nerve . . . .*

Do you ever re-read a novel/novella/short story? If so, do you have certain cherished texts, to which you return at intervals over the years? Or are you a “one and done” type, getting all you wanted/needed from a work the first time around, then moving on to answer the siren call of unread wonders, unwilling to waste time on a delight you’ve already tasted? Being an inveterate re-reader myself, I considered it a no-brainer to include this category in the “Gentle Challenge” launched earlier this month by my dear amiga, Silvia (although she’s been gracious enough to list me as co-host, don’t be deceived! I did a little word smithing & offered a few suggestions while Silvia is doing all the work!). Despite being obviously invested in this category, I found it surprisingly difficult to select a specific book for it: one choice was too long; another too emotionally demanding for my currently fragile mood; and a third was available to me only in a yellowing, brittle, visually displeasing edition (what can I say, Readers? I’m in a very “Aesthetic Movement” vibe this month; anything to distract from the political horror, right?). I finally settled on what was, from the very beginning, the obvious choice — María Gainza’s Optic Nerve, published in Thomas Bunstead’s translation from the original Spanish in 2019. Why obvious? WelI . . . when I first read Optic Nerve in 2020, I immediately lost myself in its lovely, dream-like phantasmagoria of images, literature, popular culture and events from the life of a young Argentine woman. Optic Nerve was easily one of my reading highlights that year and I intended to post about it, I really, really did, but somehow, for some reason (a cat probably jumped on my lap, or the dishwasher pinged to be unloaded) I never quite got around to it. Thanks to Silvia’s Challenge, however, I now have a chance to make amends and (one of the great pleasures of re-reading) to see if either I or the book have changed in the last five years!

My first reaction to Optic Nerve back in 2020 was similar to those fortunate few who first saw Superman, i.e., “What is it, exactly?” A novel? A memoir? A collection of essays on art or an interlocked series of short stories? This isn’t an easy question to answer, despite Optic’s relatively straightforward structure. Each chapter follows a similar pattern of focusing (although not exclusively) on one artist. For example, “Lightning at Sea” describes Courbet’s seascapes and “A Life in Pictures” discusses Rothko’s color abstractions. The paintings (mostly from the 19th and 20th centuries) spark an incursion into art history and are linked to events of “Maria’s” personal life and/or her family’s history. I use quote marks for “Maria” because, as with any work of this nature, questions arise regarding the extent to which the narrated events reflect the author’s reality. Aside from sharing their first names, both the author (Gainza) & her creation (Maria) are art critics living in Buenos Aires. Both, additionally, hail from aristocratic, once wealthy families whose finances and status were severely diminished by Argentina’s political upheavals (Juan Perón’s government confiscated the influential newspaper founded & owned by Gainza’s family). There are other resemblances between Gainza and Optic’s Maria: author Gainza is a widow and mother of a daughter; while Optic’s Maria, as we learn in bits & pieces, is pregnant and has a severely ill husband. The first time I read Optic Nerve in 2020 I was so caught up in its enchantment I naively assumed that the narrator’s biographical details were factual accounts of Gainza’s life, in effect a memoir. This time around I’m far more cautious about this assumption, especially after reading an interview in which Gainza herself describes the biographical details contained in her work as “drop[s] of color,” which she expands and amplifies in her narrative.

Although these biographical speculations are fun, they really have little to do with the thrust of Gainza’s complex, multi-layered work, which deals, above all, with the connection between an art work and its beholder, connections that transcend both time and geography and that are mental, emotional and even physical. In Optic’s first chapter, “Dreux’s Deer,” Maria first encounters the painter’s work when she’s shepherding a pair of rich tourists around a private art collection in Buenos Aires (since I’ve already clicked to wiki, I’ll spare you the work, dear Readers: Alfred de Dreux was a highly successful 19th century French painter, known for his equestrian portraits). Although Maria’s reaction is polite, she privately dismisses the painting as mere decoration, the work of a technically gifted but fundamentally empty artist. Five years later, however, when she encounters a different painting by Dreux (2019 Catapult edition, p. 6), a hunting scene in which a deer is about to go under, mauled by a pack of hunting dogs (very popular subject this, in wealthy 19th century dining rooms):

it was fireworks, what A.S. Byatt called ‘the kick galvanic.’ It reminded me that all of art rests in the gap between that which is aesthetically pleasing and that which truly captivates you. And that the tiniest thing can make the difference. I had only to set eyes on the painting and a sensation came over me: you might describe it as butterflies, but in fact for me it’s less poetic. It happens every time I feel strongly drawn to a painting. One explanation is of dopamines being released in the brain, and the consequent rise in blood pressure throughout the body * * * *

The dying animal’s look of “helpless astonishment” reminds Maria of a similar incident in Lampedusa’s great novel, The Leopard, and how well Lampedusa understood “the unpredictability of events, their tendency to go full circle at the last * * * always leaving * * * something ultimately ephemeral, certain to be lost in the mists of time.” (p. 6) The chapter closes with Maria’s recollection of a university girlfriend, who had visited a sister in France at the latter’s expense & insistence. Despite bad weather, the two decided to spend the weekend at a chateau in the countryside near Paris, bordered by a hunting preserve. During a chilly outdoor luncheon, the friend, needing to stretch her “long legs–since the age of nine she’d had the spindly legs of a deer” (p. 13), went for a slow stroll around the grounds. Bending over to free her boot, caught by chance in a pocket of mud, she’s killed by a stray bullet from the nearby hunt. As Maria observes (p. 14-15)

Whenever I think of her it’s in the second when her boot sticks in the mud and she stops where the bullet is about to strike. And I cannot tell what I should do with a death as ridiculous as hers as pointless and hypnotic, nor do I know why I mention it now, though I suppose it’s always probably the way: you write one thing in order to talk about something else.

And there you have Gainza’s beautiful, elusive technique in a nutshell: “you write about one thing” in order to talk about another. If you’re a linear type who demands a clear route from Point A to Point B this book isn’t for you. If, however, you’re willing to let the current carry you, Optic Nerve is a treasury of riches. My clumsy summary does little to give you the full impact of Gainza’s work, with its links between Henri Rousseau’s paintings of clouds & hot air balloons and Maria’s fear of flying; between an estranged brother and the paintings of El Greco; between Courbet’s seascapes and the melancholy life of a young cousin plagued by mental illness. Some of Gainza’s writing is straight art criticism & history; some of it observations on the nature of perception; and some (my favorite bits) lovely, poetic stories woven around Maria’s experiences & history. Perhaps others have as successfully integrated their personal story with the art they love (Laura Cumming’s recent Thunderclap springs to mind) but in my limited experience Gainza has created something unique.

All of this art, literature and history would be totally unbearable if Gainza’s was the least bit pedantic. Added to her other virtues, however, is a dispassionate honesty about her and her family’s privileges and a sharp wit regarding her subject. As a dropout from the docent program administered by a local museum, for example, I very much appreciated Gainza’s description of a group of school children, arranged in their little semi-circle on the floor of the art museum, bored out of their minds by their guide’s lecture on a Velázquez painting. As Maria so aptly observes (p. 148), “Carelessly administered, the history of art can be as lethal as strychnine.”

An obvious question about Optic Nerve is whether one needs to know anything about art to enjoy it. My answer is “absolutely not”! True, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who has an aversion to the visual arts, just as I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who demands a structured plot or a traditional narrative. Provided, however, that you’re open to Gainza’s highly individual technique and her strong opinions about various artists, you’re in for a treat. Because she focuses on works that are largely available in Buenos Aires’ public museums, her choice of artists is an interesting mix, including the known-to-me painters that I’ve previously mentioned (El Greco, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rothko, Rousseau & Courbet); lesser lights (Hubert Robert & Dreux, for instance) and interesting artists who were previously unknown to me, such as Cándido López, Foujita & Josep Maria Cert. “But won’t that require an awful lot of googling?” I hear you ask. You may google the images if you like (they’re readily available for almost all of these publicly held works) but Gainza is such a master of ekphrasis that you can pretty much get what you need from her written descriptions alone. Nor do you have to worry, dear Readers, about physically handling one of those zillion pound art books. Gainza numbers among her many virtues a pronounced talent for understatement and an elegantly terse style. At a mere 193 pages, you can breeze through Optic Nerve in an afternoon, or ponder its contents if you choose for the rest of your life.

The most interesting aspect of re-reading any book is comparing one’s present reaction to the one(s) that preceded it. If I’ve accomplished my task here, you can have no doubt that I love the book in 2025 as much as I did in 2020. As with any re-reading, however, something is lost and something is gained. This time around Optic Nerve lost some of its emotional impact for me (Gainza’s chapter on a lost friendship, “Separate Ways,” hit me particularly hard when I first encountered it). On the other hand, having a more analytical approach helped me make connections that had previously eluded me. Half the fun of reading this book is teasing out the links between the art and the personal stories; sometimes these are obvious, such as the chapter on Dreux’s deer; sometimes they are hard to discern indeed. This time around I actually begin to see themes emerging from certain chapters. Maybe third time around I’ll know for sure!

2020 Reading Roundup

Isn’t it a relief, dear readers, to have 2020 behind us? Unlike so many in this year of the plague, my personal situation was relatively benign (I had tons of great books, good internet access & my near and dear remained healthy) but even we lucky ones can agree that it’s quite the relief to have 2020 in the rearview mirror. One of the more pleasant annual rituals for a book blogger is the annual summary of books read and enjoyed (or not); it’s especially pleasant this year, where there’s sometimes been little else to enjoy other than books. Being, as usual, just a tiny bit behind the curve in looking over the past year (if you’ve read my blog in the past you may recall that I was several weeks late for Margaret Atwood month), my tally is accordingly

The Books of 2020, or at least most of the ones I managed to finish (I do think I opted out of Daisy Johnson’s *Fen* after completing only about half of the stories, which I found a little too creepy and disturbing for my mood this year).

coming somewhat after most of the others. This is partly because I didn’t post very much this year and didn’t formally review many books. The pandemic and a long-distance move took their toll; for much of the year my brain was in a state analogous to the slumber mode of a bad computer, making it almost impossible to read anything very long or demanding. I’m not a big numbers cruncher, especially when it comes to books, but I do keep an informal tally and I was shocked to discover that I had read large portions of, and subsequently abandoned, over eleven books. I’ve never been adverse to abandoning or postponing books that didn’t work for me at a particular moment but I’m certainly not quick to do so, especially when, as here, I was actually reading some pretty good things. It was a very odd experience — about halfway through one of the Abandoned Eleven, it was “Bing! I’m done” and off I’d go to another book, which usually met the same fate (if my binger went off in a particularly intriguing work, such as Stuart Turton’s The Devil and the Dark Water, I’d skim the end. Sometimes I wouldn’t bother.) What can I say, dear readers? This was the year I just couldn’t focus.

This was also the year when I received several visits from the Ghost of Books Past (envision, dear readers, a bookish version of Dickens’ famous spectre, only in my case toting bags of gaudy mass market paperbacks and brandishing bookish gift cards — I believe these are called “book tokens” in the U.K.), who insisted that I re-visit various reading adventures of yesteryear. This apparition first appeared in September (here in the U.S., we start commercializing Christmas pretty early). Immediately after I finished John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samara (BTW many thanks, Dolce Bellezza, for that read-along, otherwise Samara would still be adorning Mount TBR) I became absolutely fixated on locating and re-reading books that I hadn’t thought about for literally decades. Seemingly out of the blue (but we know whose doing it was, right?) I suddenly remembered enough information to locate and obtain a yellowing, mass market paperback of Gwendoline Butler’s Sarsen Place, a novel I had read decades ago, as well as a copy of The Vesey Inheritance, another read by Butler from days gone by. Sarsen Place, now sadly out of print, was worth the effort. The Vesey Inheritance was slightly less so but still a fun read.

While I might quibble with the publisher’s description of this work as “bizarre,” I definitely agree with the “delightful” and “intriguing.” Despite a certain number of anachronisms, the mystery plotting was good and I loved its depiction of late Victorian Oxford.

Set in London rather than Oxford and not quite up to the level of *Sarsen Place*, this was nevertheless a very pleasant way to escape the rigors of 2020 . . . .

Through sheer force of will I resisted the compulsion to spend October re-reading my ten favorite Georgette Heyer novels (it helped that I already knew several of them by heart), but ah, the Ghost of Books Past was far from done with me. The high school I attended several lifetimes ago had a sort of hit or miss library, mostly dull old classics (Tolstoy isn’t terribly interesting to most fifteen year olds) and the librarian had the maddening habit of only ordering one or two books from a series. At that time in my life I had particularly enjoyed one such incomplete series; I won’t identify it except to say it didn’t concern the adventures of either Trixie Belden or Bomba the Jungle Boy. But my school library had only two books from the series, and odd numbered ones at that, so I never learned either the beginning or end of the saga! Imagine the frustration and grief of my little teenybopper self! It was high time, the Ghost whispered, to atone for The Wrong of Reading Only A Few Books From A Series! Heeding my supernatural warning, I started obsessively locating and reading the entire series, seven books total, following the adventures of the main guy, his brother (who pops up around the third book) and then, for gosh sakes, the main guy’s nephew, who’s born somewhere around book five and who carries the saga forward to a new century and a new place (this author clearly knew how to hook a kid in). Ah, dear readers, the joys of completion, all the sweeter for being so long delayed!

After reading/skimming seven books from a Young Adult series (comparatively well written but, let’s face it, with rather immature characters), I could feel the Ghost beginning to fade. In late November and December I really intended to make a final push to read a few more books from my “Back to the Classics Challenge;” I really did, but the past wasn’t yet past, so to speak. Are any of you, dear readers, fans of grimdark, described by N.K. Jemison as fantasy’s equivalent to sci-fi’s dystopia sub-genre? If so, you’ll understand why, when Logen Ninefingers (aka “the Bloody Nine”) summoned me for a re-read, I hastened to obey. In a bit of severe counter-programing to the holiday season, I spent half of December re-reading Joe Abercrombie’s magnificent First Law Trilogy (the Guardian has referred to Abercrombie’s work as “delightfully twisted and evil” and it’s been proclaimed by no less than Forbes as “fantasy at its finest”). Less pompous and far funnier than Martin’s Game of Thrones, and much more attuned to human frailty than Tolkien, Abercrombie’s realpolitik, double dealing and dark humor seemed perfectly attuned to this horrible year. If you liked GOT you’d probably like the First Law Trilogy, provided you aren’t adverse to (very) naughty language and more graphic depictions of the old ultraviolence than you’d find even in Burgess’ Clockwork Orange. Don’t judge me too harshly, dear readers, we all have our moods; sometimes one longs to attend a jumble sale with Pym’s excellent women and at others simply to wander the Circle of the World with the Bloody Nine. Say one thing for Abercrombie’s morally ambiguous characters, say they’re most compelling.

Although I spent the last half of 2020 more or less successfully escaping the present, my reading year did in fact include some forward momentum. Two very bright spots indeed were my increased respect for shorter fiction and a growing interest in translated literature. Prior to this year, I had only occasionally read short fiction and then largely on the theory that it was “good for me,” a type of literary equivalent of “eat your broccoli.” I’ve noticed, however, that my fragmented attention span seems fairly widespread this year and that many of my fellow bloggers as well as myself have taken to reading short stories and novellas. Among several outstanding novellas that came my way, the following three, very different works particularly stand out:

I almost discarded this during the great moving purge; fortunately I started reading the first few pages and changed my mind. Johnson is a poet as well as a novelist and it shows in this spare, beautiful mini-epic recounting the solitary life of one of those marginal people who built the American west.

Maeve Brennan is one of those names associated with The New Yorker; her sparse output is mostly associated with that periodical. This beautifully rendered story of the psychological struggle between an emotionally fragile young Irish girl and her unrelenting grandmother is a masterpiece.

After an unfortunate early encounter with *My Antonia*, I have tended to avoid Cather’s work. This wonderfully nuanced tale of a rich young girl who gave up a fortune to marry for love has made me reconsider that decision; I’ve begun lining up novels for a “reading Cather” project.

Ah, I hear the murmur through cyber space, did she read no novels during 2020? I did, actually, and although there were far fewer in number than in prior years, they included some wonderful works. In ascending order, the three that have stayed with me the longest are:

Mandel’s latest is almost as good as *Station Eleven*. Mandel uses the fallout from a disastrous Ponzi scheme to probe the many different paths individual lives can take as well as the responsibility we owe each other. The “glass” of the title refers to an actual structure in the novel; it also suggests the fragility of any one existence and how we so easily can step into another identity.

One of the few books I reviewed last year, Warner’s masterpiece is an absolutely stunning work. Under the guise of an historical novel, Warner uses her depiction of a fictitious medieval convent to ask deeper questions about the meaning of “community.” Although *Corner* demands a moderate commitment of time (it’s long), Warner’s beautiful writing and wit make the pages fly by.

Gainza’s novel narrowly beat out Warner’s for my most outstanding read of the year. Despite thinking about *Optic Nerve* a great deal, I didn’t review it, simply because it was so wonderful I didn’t feel I could do it justice! It’s a stunning piece of autofiction in which we see the protagonist’s life and character as they are reflected, and formed, by her interaction with art.

I did say “three” novels, didn’t I? Consider this intriguing novel an honorable mention! *Parasites* is a wonderfully readable, well-constructed story of three self-absorbed siblings, each the possessor of artistic talent that falls short of that of their famous parents. Quite different from the du Maurier novels I have previously read (*Rebecca; My Cousin Rachel*), *Parasites* is loaded with the atmosphere of the London theatrical world in the 1940s. And, oh yes, the novel is said to contain strong autobiographical elements . . . .

Well, dear readers, that’s pretty much it for my 2020 reading year. How did yours go? Anyone else out there, haunted by comfort reads and cursed with fragmented attention spans?