The Optic Nerve

by María Gainza (Author) and Thomas Bunstead (Translator)

Buy now

for $ 24.99 , or download a preview

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

The 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 The Optic Nerve compellingly blends autofiction, humor, imagined memories,… (more)

The 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 The 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)

(less)

Fiction Literary South American literature