Review by New York Times Review
FURIOUS HOURS: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, by Casey Cep. (Knopf, $26.95.) Cep's remarkable first book is really two: a gripping investigation of a rural Alabama preacher who murdered five family members for the insurance in the 1970s, and a sensitive portrait of the novelist Harper Lee, who tried and failed to write her own book about the case. LOT: Stories, by Bryan Washington. (Riverhead, $25.) This audacious debut collection, set in the sand- and oil- and drug- and poverty- and resentment-soaked landscape of Houston, is a profound exploration of cultural and physical borders. SEA PEOPLE: The Puzzle of Polynesia, by Christina Thompson. (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.99.) Mystery has long attended the inhabitants of the Pacific's far-flung islands: Where did they come from, when did they get there, and how? Thompson explores these questions, with a particular focus on the early Polynesians' incredible navigational skills. WHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER, by Hugh Ryan. (St. Martin's, $29.99.) This boisterous history captures the variety and creativity of the sexual outsiders who congregated around the economic hub of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a flourishing center of gay life from the middle of the 19 th century until well into the 20 th. THE GLOBAL AGE: Europe 1950-2017, by Ian Kershaw. (Viking, $40.) In a time of uncertainty and harsh political division, Kershaw's book is a valuable reminder that Europe's recent history was a period of enormous accomplishment, both politically and economically, achieved against obstacles that make many of today's troubles seem minor by comparison. THE PARISIAN, by Isabella Hammad. (Grove, $27.) This strikingly accomplished first novel, set in the early 20th century and modeled in part on the life of the author's grandfather, captures the fate of a European-educated Arab, a man divided, like his native Palestine. NORMAL PEOPLE, by Sally Rooney. (Hogarth, $26.) Rooney dramatizes with excruciating insight the entwined lives of a high school couple as they mature into college students, bringing to light how her contemporaries think and act in private, and showing us ourselves in their predicaments. RABBITS FOR FOOD, by Binnie Kirshenbaum. (Soho, $26.) After a New Year's breakdown, the heroine of this furious comic novel checks into a Manhattan mental hospital and starts taking notes. OPTIC NERVE, by Maria Gainza. Translated by Thomas Bunstead. (Catapult, $25.) 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 full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. The book is composed of episodes in the life of MarA-a, who lives in Buenos Aires, often beginning with an anecdote about someone she knows before brilliantly finding an associative link to a work of art, then delving into the backstory of the artwork and the artist before coming full circle to how it all makes sense in Maria's life. In one chapter, MarA-a's observation of the sea prompts her to consider Gustave Courbet's seascapes ("his water was fossil-like: a slab of malachite rent hard across the middle"), before connecting the thread to her enigmatic cousin. In another chapter, MarA-a's fear of flying keeps her from attending a prestigious art convention and leads her to mull over Henri Rousseau's ability to venture beyond his limitations to shape avant-garde art. Tsuguharu Foujita's artistic decline is juxtaposed against MarA-a's longtime friend Alexia's unrealized artistic potential. There are many pleasures in Gainza's novel: its clever and dynamic structure, its many aperA§us ("happiness interests only those who experience it; nobody can be moved by the happiness of others"), 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. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 flneur of the metaphysical. A languorous woman approaching middle age, our narratorone of the many self-proclaimed black sheep in an aristocratic Argentinian family on the declinelives, 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 Montaigneand touching on Guy de Maupassant, Aubrey Beardsley, Marguerite Duras, and a host of others in betweenGainza 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 grandiosegrows tiresomea 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
