Isabelle Graw wields a fine-toothed comb, disentangling money and neurosis at the aching heart of a life lived in the art world.

Isabelle Graw’s novel-essay brilliantly succeeds in translating two such equally intangible afflictions as rising anxiety and a lack of money into a long monologue on the concrete confusions of everyday life. Elegant, metropolitan, and intellectually versed, its protagonist and narrator meets these challenges with despair or self-mockery, panic or playful lightness. The urbanites of today should have no problem recognizing themselves in these subtle self-observations, and in these disturbing and occasionally comic vignettes and reflections. A book full of melancholy and lucid insight.