Here, art is a trellis around which life knots and overlaps, severs, climbs upward. Like Faye, the novelist at the center of Rachel Cusk’s celebrated Outline trilogy, the narrator of Optic Nerve is appealingly reticent. We are supplied with the contour of a character and little else ... elegantly translated ... while often obliquely gorgeous, is not without its missteps. There are incursions into the second person that squander the immediacy Gainza has gathered with the lyrical authority of María’s voice. The novel is also dappled with quotes from writers...While these are often very good, they are sometimes clustered with a hoarder’s avidity ... 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.
... appealing and digressive ... The [unspoken tension in the narrator's life] isn’t always crystal clear in the book, which nonetheless consistently charms with its tight swirl of art history, personal reminiscence and aesthetic theories. In a series of chapters that read like discrete essays, the narrator ruminates on the desire (and the stymied desire) to travel; the expectations established within families; the lures of melancholy and nostalgia ... Parts of Optic Nerve read as straight-up art criticism, strongly voiced ... This is the first of Gainza’s books to be translated into English, and these moments make one hope that her criticism will be next to arrive.
... Gainza, in a gorgeous translation by Thomas Bunstead, mines María's elusiveness — and allusiveness; she's great with a well-placed quotation — to create a highly compelling life story told almost entirely through art ... María's descriptions of art are one of Optic Nerve's great pleasures. Without fail, they are lyric but unpretentious, imaginative and compelling ... [The descriptions of art] might seem a bit over-intellectualized, but thanks to Gainza's dry wit and realism, it's the reverse ... Gainza's own artistic tactic, it seems, is to keep her narrator's sense of discovery alive throughout the novel. 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.
... a seductively clever debut novel ... a highly original, piercingly beautiful work, a book you’ll want to savour ... At times Gainza can be evasive – often frustratingly so. I found the passages where she addresses herself in the second person 'you' a little trying. But there’s a hypnotic, oneiric quality to the way her accounts of artists’ lives merge with unsettling stories about her friends and family ... Optic Nerve is full of beautiful shocks. And they are often devastating ... Gainza is a writer who feels immediately important. I felt like a door had been kicked open in my brain...
... roving, impassioned ... If only Ms. Gainza’s personal recollections were as charismatic [as her descriptions]! Even in Thomas Bunstead’s nimble translation from the Spanish, these passages seem thin and unrealized, their significance far too private in nature to communicate much to the reader. Optic Nerve is being called a novel, if only because that label is affixed to just about anything these days (autobiography, history, TV shows, espresso drinks). But if you approach it expecting it to resolve into an organic whole you’ll be disappointed. It’s wiser to treat the chapters like stand-alone essays, each one enlivened by the delightful variety and idiosyncrasy of artistic obsession.
As a guide and critic, [the narrator] is excellent company – wry, astute, self-deprecating. Her sphere of reference is broad and catholic, the book flecked with quotations. The prose, in Thomas Bunstead’s translation, is restrained, funny, by turns (and at once) luminous and melancholy ... The text moves fluently between art criticism and history, biography, anecdote, memory and the imagined past ... But Optic Nerve as a whole is not merely episodic. It becomes richer and more complex, until a self-portrait of the narrator emerges – layered, realised as much in what is left undeveloped or partial, and culminating in something quite unexpected, which loops us back to the start and casts new light on the pall of anxiety and sadness that has shaded the text ... We are left with a profound inquiry into the place and function of art: in culture, in the gallery, in private homes, and most of all, in the narrator’s life – as remembrance, as joy and consolation, as meaning, as refuge.
...startlingly original ... By writing openly about her upper-class Argentine family, Gainza is treading on potentially treacherous ground ... And while she does label herself a black sheep...she never denies her excess of privileges. instead, in Optic Nerve, [Gainza] takes her family as one of her objects of study, an operation surely eased by the fact that the relatives she is examining belong, by now, to a family in ruins. The book is filled with images of something once magnificent failing...Gainza’s strategy in confronting the taboo of upper-class birth is to be self-deprecating — she makes fun of herself before you can — yet her gaze on her family is strikingly impersonal, as if she were surveying a curious tribe, or a work of art ... Gainza has always been a comparativist, and this practice of double vision — placing life story and art story side by side — allows the author to tease out unexpected reverberations, and occasionally a common essence, beyond the contingencies of time and place. By way of the comparison, the narrator’s life story is elevated from the chaotic realm of personal anecdote into an aesthetic object.
... Gainza writes a lingual picture of a woman who walks the echoing halls of Western cultural history with the intimate 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.
Gainza’s phenomenal first work to be translated into English is a nimble yet momentous novel ... 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.
