Optic Nerve
by Maria Gainza
(Vintage Publishing, £14.99)

THIS exquisite novel of a woman in her twenties searching for meaning through the paintings she loves is a stunning debut from Maria Gainza.

[[{"fid":"11624","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]Part autobiographical fiction, part art criticism, it’s set in her native Buenos Aires and comes across as a subtle chronicle of a city, family life and a culture deeply rooted in the “southern cone” of Latin America.  

The narrator, like Gainza an art critic living in the Argentine capital, defines herself as the “black sheep” of one of the most aristocratic families in the country. She effortlessly intersperses personal stories of friendship, marriage, love, fear of flying and family grudges with the life and work of famous painters — from Gustave Courbet to Tsugaru Foujita —  whose work hangs in the galleries of Buenos Aires.

The protagonist is as comfortable walking the empty rooms of galleries and museums of her native city as its busy streets and avenues. Whenever she is in “survival mode” she is magnetised by them, “like people running for air raid shelters in wartime.”

Literary references and brilliant quotes abound, from Michel de Montaigne, Guy de Maupassant, Aubrey Beardsley, TS Eliot and Marguerite Duras, among many others.

There are hints too of the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino but Gainza’s ways of seeing the world and what surrounds us is taken to a completely different level in what’s a revelatory meditation on Western cultural history and the wonders of the everyday world.

The writer explores the hidden gaps between visual art and how what one sees and knows “is never settled.” As John Berger writes in his seminal book Ways of Seeing: “We are never looking at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving.”

That dynamic sense of perception is what Gainza captures in her elegant prose and acute psychological insights.