Portrait of an Unknown Lady, written by art critic María Gainza (Optic Nerve) and translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, is a mesmerizing deep dive into the art world through a neo-noir female detective's quest to find a forger in Buenos Aires.
An unnamed female narrator is left reeling by the death of her employer and longtime mentor, Enriqueta Macedo. Enriqueta, along with the narrator, spent decades running a business that authenticated portraits supposedly painted by famed artist Mariette Lydis, but were actually created by a mysterious figure known only as Renée. Chasing meaning after Enriqueta's death, the narrator becomes fixated on writing a biography of Renée and attempts to piece together the scraps of her life since her disappearance years earlier.
Dreamy and atmospheric, Portrait of an Unknown Lady is a short read, deliberate in its pacing. The unnamed narrator leads readers through a labyrinth of clues about Enriqueta, Lydis and Renée, culling information from paintings, fragmented interviews and auction catalogues. These dizzying but vivid details deliver more entanglement than solution, morphing Renée herself into the absent center that nonetheless knots the plot together. While the novel's point is never to "solve" any of its core mysteries--as one might expect of a neo-noir--it depicts the shadowy and engrossing, elusive yet captivating aura of the genre, as well as of a painting. Portrait of an Unknown Lady, eschewing structure and neat plot convention for vibrant language and a hypnotic voice, complicates rather than clarifies the stories that are told about enigmatic women. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor