OPTIC NERVE

Name: OPTIC NERVE
Author: María Gainza
ISBN: 978-1-948226-16-5

by María Gainza ; translated by Thomas Bunstead ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2019

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

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A woman chronicles her city, her family, and the culture that has defined her life in this debut novel by an Argentinian journalist and art critic.

The unnamed narrator of Gainza’s first foray into fiction, which is also the first of her books to be translated into English, is a flâneur of the metaphysical. A languorous woman approaching middle age, our narrator—one of the many self-proclaimed black sheep in an aristocratic Argentinian family on the decline—lives, works, and, eventually, refuses to leave Buenos Aires due to a pathological fear of flying she develops in her late 20s. Far from feeling trapped by this semicloistered life, however, she revels in the intimacy of her city, whose every mood she faithfully chronicles in service to the moment when the “clouds occasionally part and, out of nowhere, something emerges.” As our narrator navigates her life, the reader builds a picture of her marriage, friendships, estrangements, entanglements, family grudges, and desires that feels at once spontaneous and curated. The narrator allows us an intimacy through her stream-of-consciousness impressions which the author controls through her nonchronological ordering, shifting points of view, and short tales from the lives of famous artists interspersed among the chapters. The effect is like walking through an eclectically assembled gallery show organized around the central theme of domestic ephemera. The narrator’s childhood exploration of Buenos Aires while walking the family dog leads to Toulouse-Lautrec’s debauchery in the dance halls of Montemarte; her husband’s friendship with a prostitute in the cancer ward where he is receiving treatment opens the doors to the mystery of Rothko’s refusal to finish his commissioned murals for the Four Seasons in New York. With cultural touch points ranging from the Doors to Michel de Montaigne—and touching on Guy de Maupassant, Aubrey Beardsley, Marguerite Duras, and a host of others in between—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, where, when, "the grandiose…grows tiresome…a simple little hill does well enough.”

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

Pub Date: April 9, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-948226-16-5

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Catapult

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
PORTRAIT OF AN UNKNOWN LADY
by María Gainza ; translated by Thomas Bunstead

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.