Portrait of an Unknown Lady

Starred review from November 1, 2021
Gainza (Optic Nerve) returns with a ruminative account of the pursuit of a master forger who has gone off the grid in a dreamy Buenos Aires. The unnamed narrator, a young woman, works for art authenticator Enriqueta Macedo, who for decades has been fraudulently authenticating paintings forged by a woman named Renée, who specialized in passing off works of Mariette Lydis, one of the country’s greatest portraitists (“They resemble women about to turn into animals, or animals not since long made human,” the narrator says of Lydis’s subjects). Gainza paints an impressionistic group portrait of artist, authenticator, and forger: Lydis’s flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna to Argentina, recounted through an auction catalog (“Painting is worth more if there’s a story behind it”); Enriqueta’s initiation as a young woman into a group called the Melancholical Forgers, Inc.; and Renée’s reign during the “golden age of art forgery.” The narrator, who after Enriqueta’s death becomes an art critic, is intrigued by Renée as a biographical subject, and embarks on a quest to track down the long-since-disappeared counterfeiter. Digressions, aphorisms, and dead ends pile up along the way in a hypnotic search defined by “Sehnsucht... the German term denoting a melancholic desire for some intangible thing.” The characters’ incertitude and the narrative’s lack of resolution only intensify the mysterious communion Gainza evokes between like-minded souls. This captivating work is one to savor.

February 1, 2022
The mutable, esoteric art world is again the setting for award-winning Argentinian Gainza's latest, deftly translated by British writer-editor Bunstead, who also English-enabled her award-winning Optic Nerve (2019). Gainza's narrator warns early on, "Any person reading this ought not to expect names, numbers, or dates." She reveals herself as a former art critic surrounded by unreliable alliances, fake canvases, and other people's stories. Hers is one of four threads here, with the others featuring the late Enriqueta Macedo, who "was the country's preeminent expert in art authentication"; Mariette Lydis, an Austrian noble-by-marriage who emigrated to Buenos Aires and became a sought-after portraitist "of the great and good of the city"; and Ren�e, a forger with "the disconcerting ability to enter the soul of another," who was once among the Hotel Melancholical Forgers, Inc. Of course the four-prongs--critic, authenticator, painter, forger--intermittently intersect and overlap, but Gainza doesn't even hint at easy answers or exacting closure by the novel's end. That titular ""unknown""-ness--times four--might prove disappointing to some, but shrewd audiences will surely enjoy the engrossing challenge of an unpredictable pursuit.

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Starred review from February 1, 2022
An art critic chases the identity of a legendary forger through the testimonies of the aging counterculture denizens who knew her. In 1960s Buenos Aires, a group of "tatty bohemians" take up residence in a decaying mansion they've dubbed the Hotel Melancholical. Among the poets, painters, photographers, translators, and philosophers that make up the heady menagerie is a hypnotically charismatic, flinty-eyed woman named Ren�e who is an accomplished art forger, specializing in the works of (real-life) Austrian Argentine portraitist Mariette Lydis. The hotel's residents all have a role in the scheme--from forging the labels on the backs of paintings to publicizing the pieces to Buenos Aires galleries--and they all split the resulting profits, but they need somebody on the inside to provide the final touch: a certificate of authenticity from the art valuations department of the Ciudad Bank. This is managed by Enriqueta, Ren�e's friend and fellow student at Argentinean Fine Arts Academy, who uses her position to pass along Ren�e's forgeries for years until Ren�e, always a mercurial figure, drops out of the art scene and then out of sight entirely. Or at least this is what Enriqueta tells her new assistant, our narrator, who opens the novel many years later holed up in the Hotel �toile, where she has retreated to write the story of the indomitable Enriqueta, known at the end of her long career at the bank simply as "Herself"; the fabled Ren�e, whose life the narrator pieces together through the contradictory accounts of her now-octogenarian cohort; and Mariette Lydis, whose actual story rivals anything that could be invented for her. Gainza's expertise in the world of art criticism, with its cultivated language and capricious moods, and her loving eye for the history, architecture, and people of Buenos Aires are on display in this book, as they were in her debut, Optic Nerve (2019). As fine as that novel was, however, the nuance in the way this story develops, wending its way through its layers of plot, history, and biography even as it spotlights the unflinching women who stalk through them all, is the work of an author in full command of her talents. The result is an exploration of identity and authenticity that asks what it means to be "real," as the term is applied either to a work of art or to a life. Subtle, incandescent, and luminous--a true master's work.

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