PositiveThe Guardian\"As a guide and critic, [the narrator] is excellent company – wry, astute, self-deprecating. Her sphere of reference is broad and catholic, the book flecked with quotations. The prose, in Thomas Bunstead’s translation, is restrained, funny, by turns (and at once) luminous and melancholy ... The text moves fluently between art criticism and history, biography, anecdote, memory and the imagined past ... But Optic Nerve as a whole is not merely episodic. It becomes richer and more complex, until a self-portrait of the narrator emerges – layered, realised as much in what is left undeveloped or partial, and culminating in something quite unexpected, which loops us back to the start and casts new light on the pall of anxiety and sadness that has shaded the text ... We are left with a profound inquiry into the place and function of art: in culture, in the gallery, in private homes, and most of all, in the narrator’s life – as remembrance, as joy and consolation, as meaning, as refuge.\
