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PRAISE FOR OPTIC NERVE

The New York Times Book Review, One of the Notable Books of the Year

Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, and Financial Times

A Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch

One of El País’s Best Books of the 21st Century

“In this delightful autofiction—the first book by Gainza, an Argentine art critic, to appear in English—a woman delivers pithy assessments of world-class painters along with glimpses of her life, braiding the two into an illuminating whole.”

—The New York Times Book Review, One of the Notable Books of the Year

“Appealing and digressive . . . María’s store of information about painters and their lives can make reading the book feel, delightfully, like auditing a course . . . Consistently charms with its tight swirl of art history, personal reminiscence and aesthetic theories.”

—JOHN WILLIAMS, The New York Times Book Review

“A roving, impassioned hybrid of art history and memoir . . . The pithy biographical portions of Optic Nerve are bracing correctives to potted textbook histories . . . Treat the chapters like stand-alone essays, each one enlivened by the delightful variety and idiosyncrasy of artistic obsession.”

—SAM SACKS, The Wall Street Journal

“Optic Nerve would be worth reading as an art history lesson alone; its descriptions of great paintings are phenomenal, as are its lives-of-the-artists anecdotes . . . 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.”

—LILY MEYER, NPR

“Gainza’s long-awaited English-language debut is a provocative novel that investigates the power, value, and emotional significance that art carries, from the perspective of one deeply curious Argentinian woman.”

—DAVID CANFIELD, Entertainment Weekly, 1 of 20 New Books to Read This Month

“Here, art is a trellis around which life knots and overlaps, severs, climbs upward . . . 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.”

—DUSTIN ILLINGWORTH, The Nation

“Gainza’s phenomenal first work to be translated into English is a nimble yet momentous novel about the connection between one woman’s personal life and the art she observes . . . There are many pleasures in Gainza’s novel: its clever and dynamic structure, its many aperçus, and some of the very best writing about art around. 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.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)

“Falling somewhere between essay and close personal narrative, Optic Nerve reads like a museum. It encompasses countless styles, eras, and characters, offering new stories and ideas for our narrator to follow down winding hallways. Considering artist legacies, Argentine culture, and the accuracy of perception, Gainza paints life and art as adjacent forces; fabricated images and stories become real, casting their shadows onto memory.”

—NIKKI SHANER-BRADFORD, The Paris Review

“Startlingly original . . . Both Gainza’s writing style and her taste in art display a preference for understatement . . . One senses a certain arbitrariness, a sincerity of taste that brings to mind Borges’s literary enthusiasms . . . Rare and exquisite.”

—MAXINE SWANN, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Optic Nerve is celebration of the act of allowing yourself to see with your eyes, your spirit, and your heart, before you let your brain take over again.”

—CRISTINA ARREOLA, Bustle

“Optic Nerve is a vital read for anyone who knows that seeing something isn’t the same thing as perceiving it, and that once you understand the distinction between the two, entirely new worlds can open up, unconstrained from the restrictions too often placed upon them.”

—KRISTIN IVERSEN, NYLON

“Berger-esque, Cusk-esque, Sebaldian, but of course a magic all its own, this novel will delight any flexible, curious mind that happens upon it.”

—EMILY TEMPLE, Literary Hub

“[A] profound inquiry into the place and function of art . . . The prose, in Thomas Bunstead’s translation, is restrained, funny, by turns (and at once) luminous and melancholy.”

—AMY SACKVILLE, The Guardian

“Erudite and unusual, Gainza’s voice evokes both John Berger and Silvina Ocampo even as she creates something wholly new.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Optic Nerve is one of the best books I’ve read in years. How did María Gainza pull off something so risky when it never reads as anything less than delightful and engrossing? This is a book that loosens the restraints on literature and gives us a new way of seeing.”

—GABE HABASH, author of Stephen Florida

“In between autofiction and the microstories of artists, between literary meetups and the intimate chronicle of a family, its past and its misfortunes, this book is completely original, gorgeous, on occasions delicate and other times brutal. And this woman-guide, who goes from Lampedusa to the Doors with crushing elegance, is unforgettable: she knows too much even though she declares herself scatterbrained and uncapable for modern life, even though she only feels alive in front of a secret painting, hiding somewhere in a South American museum.”

—MARIANA ENRÍQUEZ, author of Things We Lost in the Fire

“I was reminded of Berger’s Ways of Seeing . . . It’s so sophisticated and fascinating, yet has a Calvino-esque light touch. Rigorous and mercurial.”

—CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT, author of Pond

“Exceptional.”

—ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS, author of Dublinesque

“It is utterly unique how Gainza interweaves art into her book.”

—CEES NOOTEBOOM, author of The Following Story