Review of MONA'S EYES by Thomas Schlesser (New Release)

 2.5 Stars

This novel is a translation from the French Les Yeux de Mona written by a French art historian.

Ten-year-old Mona has a brief episode of blindness and there is concern that she might suffer permanent vision loss. Her grandfather Henry, whom Mona calls Dadé, is supposed to take her for weekly visits to a psychiatrist but he decides “he would administer a therapy of a totally different kind, a therapy capable of compensating for the ugliness inundating her childhood.” He decides that, each week over the course of a year, he will take her to see a work of art “to lodge in her memory all the art offered in terms of beauty and significance” should she lose her sense of sight. For each of the 52 works, he tells Mona about the artist’s background, discusses artistic techniques, and concludes with the life lesson suggested by that piece.

The novel’s structure is repetitive. Dadé and Mona study a work of art in one of Paris’ galleries and she then applies the lesson learned from the art to her daily life. For instance, a painting by Raphael, Henry claims, instructs that people cultivate detachment, “not being the slave of one’s emotions, and of knowing to keep them at a respectable distance.” In the next chapter, Mona sees her mother’s fear and “reckoning she’d gain nothing from increasing it by expressing her own, she kept it to herself.” Likewise, a painting by Marie-Guillemine Benoist exposes “the demons of segregation” so in the following chapter Mona is inspired to tell a classmate that “’the [school]yard belongs to everyone.’” This structure is repeated 52 times!

The book strains credulity. Has the author ever met a 10-year-old child? In my 30 years of teaching high school, I met some very intelligent students who have gone on to great success, but I never encountered one who was as precocious as Mona. The way she speaks and thinks “about complex readings, learned interpretations, bold decipherments, and hypotheses” suggests a maturity and understanding well beyond her age.

There’s also the issue of how Henry speaks to Mona. Much is made of his “determination to talk to her like an adult,” but his vocabulary is much too sophisticated to be understood even by a precocious child. More than once, Henry senses that, because of “the dreadful complexity of his words,” Mona “couldn’t understand a word of this explanation” but he just plows on. His tone is also overly pedantic. He makes statements like “’this heightened pointillism is similar to the effect of those fragments known as tessellae” and “Whistler’s favorite artist was actually Hokusai, the famous creator of The Great Wave’” (as if Mona would know this Japanese artist) and Goya maintained “’a keen complicity with the great Spanish thinkers, such as Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos and Martin Zapater, who wanted to be free of religious obscurantism’” (as if a 10-year-old would be familiar with Spanish philosophers).

There is no doubt that the author is an intelligent and learned man, but some of his references, via Henry who acts as his mouthpiece, just seem intended to impress readers with his eruditeness. There are statements like “Henry thought of Werner Herzog, the director of the film Aguirre, the Wrath of God, in which the opening shot of Machu Picchu, with its mountains in the mist, was an image worthy of Friedrich or Turner” and “This curious approach . . . had come to him from a Japanese animated movie, My neighbor Totoro, one of Hayao Miyazaki’s marvels” and Vienna in the early 20^th century “was promoting the atonal music of Schoenberg, the disruptive architecture of Adolf Loos, the critical journalism of Karl Kraus, and the pictorial folly of Schiele and Kokoschka” and “Henry was thinking of all the artists, immersed in hybrid, intentionally immoral visions, belonging to that tendency dubbed ‘Decadent’: Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon in France, James Ensor and Fernand Khnopff in Belgium, Max Klinger in Germany.” Is is necessary to drop in names all the time: Degas was “admired by the poets of his time, notably Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry” and a Rosa Bonheur painting recalls “George Sand’s descriptions in The Devil’s Pool, a novel published in 1846, three years before the success of Plowing in the Nivernais at the Salon”? Do we really need to know that Gustav Klimt “lived at No. 19 on the Berggasse” in Vienna or that the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville is at No. 52 Rue de Rivoli in Paris? Henry is able to quote from memory fairly lengthy quotations from Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Cézanne, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Louise Bourgeois?

The author also assumes the reader has a certain familiarity with art and its terminology. Each work of art is described, often using terms like “mise en abyme” and “pentimenti” and “barycenter” and “contrapposto pose” and “chevet” and “apsidiole” and “cuisse de nymphe” and “parallelepipeds” and “coronal suture” and “nuagiste” and “alizarin crimson.” I understand a photo of each piece of art will be included in the print text; since I was sent an eARC I had to do an online image search.

The book is marketed to art enthusiasts and fans of literary fiction, so I am the target consumer, but I was disappointed. I’m an art enthusiast: I make a point of going to art galleries in the cities I visit and I enjoy reading art history texts and have taken an art history course. I read primarily literary fiction so I am aware of the qualities of that genre. In this book, however, there is in fact little fiction; there’s only a simple, predictable plot, and the characters are unrealistic and so unrelatable. Literary fiction focuses on themes, but the themes in the novel are not profound. Who would dispute the power of art/beauty to edify and influence? And the lessons Mona learns are just clichés mentioned in the chapter titles: Know yourself and Respect humble folks and Let feelings be expressed and All is but dust and Less is more. The book is an art history tome. If I had approached the book at a leisurely pace as an art history text, I would perhaps have enjoyed it more, but it is marketed as a novel. This hybrid of art history text and fiction does not work for me.

The publisher suggests Life of Pi, The Kite Runner, The Little Paris Bookshop, and The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry as comparable titles. I beg to differ; I enjoyed all those titles, but Mona’s Eyes is not in the same category. This book might appeal to those who loved Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder.  I would not recommend it to anyone looking for a work of fiction with believable characters, a compelling plot, and profound themes.

Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.