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A Novel
by Maria Gainza
New York Times Notable author María Gainza, who dazzled critics with Optic Nerve, returns with the captivating story of an auction house employee on the trail of an enigmatic master forger.
In the Buenos Aires art world, a master forger has achieved legendary status. Rumored to be a woman, she specializes in canvases by the painter Mariette Lydis, a portraitist of Argentinean high society. But who is this absurdly gifted creator of counterfeits? What motivates her? And what is her link to the community of artists who congregate, night after night, in a strange establishment called the Hotel Melancólico?
On the trail of this mysterious forger is our narrator, an art critic and auction house employee through whose hands counterfeit works have passed. As she begins to take on the role of art-world detective, adopting her own methods of deception and manipulation, she warns us "not to proceed in expectation of names, numbers or dates...My techniques are those of the impressionist."
Driven by obsession and full of subtle surprise, Portrait of an Unknown Lady is a highly seductive and enveloping meditation on what we mean by "authenticity" in art, and a captivating exploration of the gap between what is lived and what is told.
"Gainza returns with a ruminative account of the pursuit of a master forger who has gone off the grid in a dreamy Buenos Aires...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." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[T]he work of an author in full command of her talents...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." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The mutable, esoteric art world is again the setting for award-winning Argentinian Gainza's latest, deftly translated by British writer-editor Bunstead...Shrewd audiences will surely enjoy the engrossing challenge of an unpredictable pursuit." - Booklist
"Intelligent and tensile...A loose investigation into the nature of art and of memory, scattered with gems of intrigue and insight." - Lit Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year
"There are many pleasures to be had in reading Portrait of an Unknown Lady: its sublime, transcendent sentences, its arch and shadowy figures. Most of all, the zone to which you are transported, which is a Buenos Aires of canvases, trap doors, and dreams." - Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy
"Vividly detailed and saturated with intricate feeling, Gainza's novel is an engrossing exploration of authenticity, obsession, and the enveloping allure of art." - Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
This information about Portrait of an Unknown Lady was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
María Gainza was born in Buenos Aires, where she still resides. She has worked as a correspondent for the New York Times in Argentina, as well as for ARTnews. She has also been a contributor to Artforum, The Buenos Aires Review, Radar, the cultural supplement from Argentine newspaper Página/12. She is coeditor of the collection Los Sentidos (The Senses) on Argentinean art, and in 2011 she published Textos elegidos (Selected Texts).
Thomas Bunstead has translated some of the leading Spanish-language writers working today, including Bernardo Atxaga, Agustín Fernández Mallo, and Enrique Vila-Matas, and his own writing has appeared in publications such as Brixton Review of Books, Lit Hub, and The White Review. He is currently a Royal Literary Fellow teaching at Aberystwyth University. He was born in London and now lives in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
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