Little Elephant's Big Year by Martin Thomas

Little Elephant's Big Year by Martin Thomas

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 New York Times Book Review, Notable Book of the Year and Editors' Choice

The narrator of Optic Nerve is an Argentinian woman whose obsession is art. The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her.

In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo's bodies. The mystery of Rothko's refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator's husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits G ricault's workshop; Gustave Courbet's devilish seascapes incite viewers to have sex, or to eat an apple; Picasso organizes a cruel banquet in Rousseau's honor . . . All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator's life in Buenos Aires―her family and work; her loves and losses; her infatuations and disappointments. The effect is of a character refracted by environment, composed by the canvases she studies.

Seductive and capricious, Optic Nerve marks the English-language debut of a major Argentinian writer. It is a book that captures, like no other, the mysterious connections between a work of art and the person who perceives it.

Martin Thomas studied chemistry at the University of Jena, where he graduated with a diploma thesis about the theoretical calculation of surface-enhanced Raman scattering in summer 2012. For his PhD, he joined the research group of Prof. Dr. Barbara Kirchner at the University of Leipzig. In the beginning of 2013, he followed the group to the Mulliken Center for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Bonn, where he defended his PhD thesis in spring 2016. His research was focused on the simulation of vibrational spectra by ab initio molecular dynamics techniques, providing detailed insight into the infrared, Raman, and vibrational circular dichroism spectra of liquid systems.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780995697232
ISBN 10	099569723X
Title	Little Elephant's Big Year
Author	Martin Thomas
Series	Little Elephants
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Wacky Bee Books
Year published	2017-10-15
Number of pages	32
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.