Two chemists with major chemistry, a dog with a big vocabulary, and a popular cooking show are among the elements of this unusual compound. 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. 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. 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). 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 Étoile, 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 Renée, 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. Renée, always a mercurial figure, drops out of the art scene and then out of sight entirely.
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