Portrait of an Unknown Lady, translated by Thomas Bunstead, is a seemingly more conventional novel about a high society con artist in 1960s Argentina. But like Optic Nerve, it’s a layered narrative told through impressionistic vignettes by a narrator who is attracted to the sadness and strangeness of others ... Gainza’s novel becomes a puzzle as we question the most improbable biographical details. How much has been fabricated by the narrator? Does authenticity really matter? And exactly whose life story is she really interested in: artist, forger or authenticator? ... Gainza weaves a fascinating, often confounding story about beauty, obsession and authenticity ... Like Bolaño, she writes stories within stories, each with its own melancholy mood and unsolvable mystery ... a novel with many beautiful, confounding moments. Maria Gainza is sharp, modern and playful, a writer who multiplies the possibilities for fiction.
This is a truly exquisite novel ... It is moving, clever and written with a wry precision ... The quest for Renée is ever more elusive and beyond reach. Was she a genius or a hack? ... But the book is playing a far more intricate game. It seemed plausible to give nods to writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, given the interest in the aesthetic, the fictitious and the transgressive.
If the result resembles a set of spirited and playful sketches more than a grand, unified canvas, Portrait of an Unknown Lady does show effectively why fakes will always catch the literary eye ... A good chunk of the book – framed as entries to an auction catalogue – engagingly traces her passage from pre-war Vienna via avant-garde circles in London and Paris to Buenos Aires ... Sadly, the hunt, and the plot, peters out a bit ... These tend to feel sludgy when they should be crisp ... Thomas Bunstead’s translation smartly juggles the different registers of Gainza’s prose – with its mimicry of critical art-speak, dealers’ jargon, law-court legalese – but the sheer variety of tone itself hints at a softening of focus and outline.
It feels like the Argentine writer is having fun ... This is a clever novel that explores the gap between what’s remembered and what’s real, and poses questions about the nature of originality and sincerity ... Of course, fiction itself is simulation, as Gainza’s painterly prose reminds us.
As in her striking if uneven debut Optic Nerve, Ms. Gainza proves herself a dab hand at concisely digesting artists’ lives, finding delight in idiosyncrasy and social rebellion ... The power of deception, and its usefulness in unsettling bourgeois certitudes, is central to the depictions, which draw from yet playfully fictionalize real periods in Argentine history ... But there is another level of dissimulation that seems at odds with this gamesome trickery. Cuellar, a real figure, was known by friends and admirers as La Negra, which is how Ms. Gainza refers to her in the Spanish text. The sobriquet has resonances with Ms. Gainza’s original title, La Luz Negra, or The Black Light, deriving from the tool used by art authenticators. But, presumably for reasons of political sensitivity, all of this has been scrubbed from Thomas Bunstead’s translation, in which Cuellar is only called Renée. A significant amount of racial and political subtext has thus been excised from Ms. Gainza’s book, which may account for its overall thinness. A bowdlerized version of a novel celebrating artistic radicals is a dispiriting kind of oxymoron.
... a spare but vivid peek inside a female-dominated environment that’s both fascinatingly specific and deeply universal ... Through catalog descriptions, court transcripts and the narrator’s own introspective voice, acclaimed Argentine author Gainza, an art critic herself, deftly explores the quest for truth, both in brushstrokes and within oneself. Portrait of an Unknown Lady offers no easy answers but provides immense pleasure in the journey to find them.
A fast, almost noir-like novel, but fittingly for the world of the novel; it never quite settles in one place, rendering the final effect a bit too ephemeral rather than haunting ... The writing is lovely, drifting from beautiful narration into the epistolary through the catalogue ... Gainza’s now-signature art-centric prose is on full display here ... In spite of the deep questions Gainza poses about the true value of art, she never settles enough to really cut to the heart. It feels almost fitting, for a book attempting to paint the portrait of a woman through her inevitably-futile quest for another, but this inevitability too leaves the novel feeling fleeting ... There’s a lot to like in Portrait of an Unknown Lady,...but despite the novel’s readability I was left feeling more like a pinball than as someone in on the con ... Of course, the actual Renée is never found, though something of her likeness is produced through the layered brush-strokes of those that knew her. Can a facsimile ever surpass the original, or at least sit alongside her? Can a good story alone elevate art? Perhaps to some degree, but the extent to which leaves a bit to be desired.
This tight, eccentric romp through the last sixty years of Argentina’s art scene asks pressing questions about the value of art, the nature of reality, and what constitutes an individual after they’re gone. And it does so through a translation—arguably the closest textual critique—of a novel about art criticism, written by an art critic ... In reading Portrait, I couldn’t help but wonder if Bunstead, as he was translating, was as delighted as I was by the text’s assertions and demonstrations that the line between original and iteration is an imaginary one, maintained less by quality than by systems complex and fragile—so precarious that a single weakness can bring the whole thing crashing down ... The objective realities of Reneé’s existence, a translation’s fidelity, a painting’s authenticity: these are beside the point. In the world of Portrait, objective reality isn’t what matters. The only thing that matters is whether something felt real, felt true, felt genuine.
...clever and captivating ... elegantly translated ... Gainza, author of the acclaimed 2019 novel Optic Nerve and herself an art critic, has taken the world of Argentinian art forgery as her subject, and wrought from it a richly layered fiction that often limns history ... erudite and engagingly digressive.
... a mesmerizing deep dive into the art world through a neo-noir female detective's quest to find a forger in Buenos Aires ... Dreamy and atmospheric, Portrait of an Unknown Lady is a short read, deliberate in its pacing. The unnamed narrator leads readers through a labyrinth of clues about Enriqueta, Lydis and Renée, culling information from paintings, fragmented interviews and auction catalogues. These dizzying but vivid details deliver more entanglement than solution, morphing Renée herself into the absent center that nonetheless knots the plot together. While the novel's point is never to 'solve' any of its core mysteries--as one might expect of a neo-noir--it depicts the shadowy and engrossing, elusive yet captivating aura of the genre, as well as of a painting. Portrait of an Unknown Lady, eschewing structure and neat plot convention for vibrant language and a hypnotic voice, complicates rather than clarifies the stories that are told about enigmatic women
... a detective story, but not the traditional kind whose mystery demands to be solved ... The novel also contains so many engaging art-related anecdotes and digressions that the reader starts to anticipate them with pleasure ... Like the Lydis auction catalog a clever mix of fiction and fact, this document has the ludic, labyrinthine feel of a Borges tale—appropriately enough, given that the accused, a collector named Federico Manuel Vogelius (whose guilt or innocence is never firmly established), was an actual friend of Borges ... It can be more than a little disorienting at times, not knowing for sure what we are being told is true and what is false and what falls somewhere in between, but that is fitting in a novel so much concerned with misconception and duplicity.
... crepuscular but dreamy ... The naughty pleasure of this novel is bound up in our fascination with fakes, especially when executed in the cavalier mode of Robin Hood. Perhaps Buenos Aires is more forgiving, but I doubt it.
Gainza is an art critic, and her story progresses through a series of wonderful images, as if followed through a View-Master ... Gainza is fast becoming one of Argentina’s most sophisticated writers thanks to the imaginative twirls her writing takes. That can make her hard to follow sometimes – Portrait of an Unknown Lady incorporates confessions, interviews, court records, art catalogues and true stories hidden in false stories 'like rhinestones in the snow', in M’s words – but there is a joy in the freedom with which she turns the traditional art crime thriller on its head.
Bunstead, as translator, is able to render her voice with equal enthusiasm ... Gainza brings up interesting questions about the ethics of criticism ... Here’s where Gainza has tremendous fun with fakery, and where her inventiveness and language breathe a new dimension into the novel ... It’s this fashionable combination of fiction and nonfiction that gives the novel its playfulness ... Less successful is the second half of the novel ... Renée’s life, while interesting, doesn’t generate the kind of narrative propulsion one hopes for. She is both mystery and disappointment, both to the narrator and, sadly, to the reader. M. doesn’t have enough to write her book, and the novel becomes a sort of catalog of M.’s failure to uncover the truth of a person ... Gainza’s ideas about art and value are compelling throughout, and she is certainly adept at drawing parallels between imitation, identity, and truly knowing something or someone. The issue is that reading about the metaphoric parallels in this novel is like viewing paintings in a gallery. Gainza’s ideas are on display, we can see them and recognize their thematic importance, but they never really feel engaged, nor do they produce satisfying dramatic outcomes. In a sense, there’s little to feel here, but loads to admire. That said, this is also the kind of artful novel whose intention isn’t to satisfy dramatically. The plot, if any, is a muted tone of gray. There and not there. Gainza is much more interested in presenting a portrait of three (actually, four, including M.) women as they rebel against the art world and the select few who get to partake in it. The proletariat may well get to share in the pleasure of art by visiting museums, but who owns its true value? Gainza’s three women are each, in their own way, raising a big middle finger to Art, Inc.
...defftly translated ... Gainza doesn’t even hint at easy answers or exacting closure by the novel’s end ... That titular 'unknown'-ness—times four—might prove disappointing to some, but shrewd audiences will surely enjoy the engrossing challenge of an unpredictable pursuit.
Gainza’s expertise in the world of art criticism, with its cultivated language and capricious moods, and her loving eye for the history, architecture, and people of Buenos Aires are on display in this book, as they were in her debut ... the result is an exploration of identity and authenticity that asks what it means to be 'real,' as the term is applied either to a work of art or to a life. Subtle, incandescent, and luminous—a true master’s work.
The characters’ incertitude and the narrative’s lack of resolution only intensify the mysterious communion Gainza evokes between like-minded souls. This captivating work is one to savor.
