Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

Argentine fiction

Original title – El Nervio óptico

Translator – Thomas Bunstead

Source – Library copy

I took a break over the weekend I had originally intended to blog every day of the Woman in Translation month but I had a busy weekend with Amanda my Father visited my house, and we had a meal then we had a day in the peaks Sunday and a roast which we hadn’t had for a few weeks with all the trips to Scotland anyway I am back and back to the woman in translation month reviews and this a writer I have had on my list to get to and so when I saw this on the shelf at the library I felt it was time. Maira Gainza is a well-known art critic and writer for a number of papers in Argentina. She also writes for the Magazine Artforum, which is, of course, the title of a novella by her fellow Argentina writer Cesar Aira. This was her debut novel. This book is about art a woman that loves art but what also connects us to art.

Hunting scenes were quite common in Dreux’s day, evocations of a sport that had been a class marker since the Middle Ages, when the hunt became an elite pastime and often the only means of preparing men for war. An unintended by-product was that it gave the nobility a way of measuring itself – though only against itself. The first ever enclosures of forests and common land came about to enable exclusive access to big game. Commoners had to make do with birds and rabbits; bears, wolves and deer became the landowner’s right.

The hunting scenes in the opening chapter remind me of those I seen in a country houses over the years.

We meet our narrator as she is showing rich people around the art sights of Buenos Aires. This is one of those books that hasn’t any plot other than her describing her interactions with art and how others connect to the art she loves. this is one of those books you need your phone nearby to google the art she is talking about I hadn’t heard of Dreux a painter of wildlife scenes hunting scenes with Deer in the sport that many years ago we saw in most country inns. the `Candido Lopez, so the book goes on as she mixes art and literature in that way I WISH i could I have a visual memory I can recall most of the art I have seen and place in find=e detail, but when it comes to quotes IMy mind is a sea of jumble words with islands of pictures so I envied her as a narrator. The one artist I did know a little around is Mark Rothko an abstract painter that art you can fall into. So when she sees  A rothko on a hospital wall(an odd choice for hospital art imho), she makes a connection as her other half is ill.

The years of his greatest success, from 1949 to 1964, coincided with Rothko’s life unravelling: his marriage fell apart, his friends got as far away from him as they could, he drank just about anything he could get his hands on and became racked with hatred. He was on his way down, the spiral tight-ening. One stormy night, as he went to leave his apartment building, the porter told him to take care in the foul weather. To this Rothko said: ‘There’s only one thing I need to take car of : stopping the Black from swallowing the red”

How tru Rothko art is alway one I felt can overwhelm when  you see them!!

I loved this book it reminds me how much I miss art shows we used to have on tv I don’t go as often as I should to see the latest art shows not as much as I did a couple of decades ago when the art world was more covered, and I knew the artist names more then. I miss those days. This reminds me how much one can connect with great art and the power it can well up in a great writer here like Maira Gainza I know she has been compared to some English language writers Oliva Laing and Rachel cusk both of whom I have to read, although I recently brought a CUSK.  So for me as a blogger and reader, I can only reference a couple of her fellow Argentine writers. Firstly is Luis Sagasti, another book that deals with how we experience and deal with art, another book where the feeling and connections are more than the plot. Then we have the great Cesar Aira I wonder if they know each over give his book around his obbbsession with the magax=zine Art Forum which I think in his book is more an imagined concept of a magazine but he has a love of art as one of the other books deals with a famous painter.

Have you read this book or have you a favourite novel that blends art and literature