Name: Optic Nerve
ISBN: 9781948226165

María Gainza

Blending fiction, personal essay, and art history, this debut is a "completely original book" (Mariana Enríquez), "reminiscent of John Berger's Ways of Seeing" (Claire-Louise Bennett), about an Argentinian woman obsessed with art.

Optic Nerve

Andrew Louis

Stories of old money characters (meh) but the writing is great and I enjoyed the way art history was woven into each story.

Emma Nash

People need to know that, in addition to more art historical information than I retained from all of college, this book also contains an extended description of the final scene in the movie Point Break. Really fucking good.

Morgan Thomas

Robert Hinchcliffe

Anne 

Nooshin

Rebekah Drapeau 

Rachel

Maria Gainza

'Whenever I’m in survival mode I find myself magnetised by museums and galleries, like people running for air raid shelters in wartime . . .' The narrator of Optic Nerve is an Argentinian woman whose obsession is art. The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her. In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo’s bodies. The mystery of Rothko's refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator's husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits Géricault's workshop; Gustave Courbet's devilish seascapes incite viewers “to have sex, or to eat an apple”; Rousseau organizes a cruel banquet in Picasso’s honor. . . . All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator's life in Buenos Aires—her family and work; her loves and losses; her infatuations and disappointments. The effect is of a character refracted by environment, composed by the canvases she studies. Seductive and capricious, Optic Nerve is a book that captures, like no other, the mysterious connections between a work of art and the person who perceives it.

Optic Nerve

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