Reviewed by Kristen Hall-Geisler
Mona’s Eyes by Thomas Schlesser is a bona fide international hit. It has landed on many best-seller lists and has been translated into at least twenty languages since its French debut in 2024. It’s easy to see why: this novel has been almost engineered to succeed, from its structure to its style. The framing narrative tugs on the reader’s heartstrings while the meat of the book delivers a survey of art history.
The Mona of the title is a ten-year-old girl who has frightening episodes of sudden blindness. She visits doctors, but the cause of her loss of sight is a mystery. In addition to medical testing, she is advised to visit a psychologist. Her widowed grandfather, Henry, offers to take her to these weekly appointments to relieve the burden on her harried parents. Rather than delivering her to a therapist, however, Henry takes Mona to the museum every Wednesday. In his reckoning, if Mona is going to lose her sight, she should first see as many great works of art as possible. His plan is to visit one work of art each week and contemplate it in silence. Then Henry will supply its history and a sketch of the artist’s relevant biography, and Mona will share her thoughts on the work.
This is a hefty book, at nearly 450 pages in the English version published by Europa Editions and translated from French by Hildegarde Serle. Mona and Henry maintain their schedule for fifty-two weeks, meaning they contemplate and discuss fifty-two artworks. The reader is welcome to look up any of the artworks online, but the hardcover edition of the novel comes with a hidden treat: the book’s jacket folds out to supply thumbnail images of every work the pair visits. The images are too small to see the details Mona and Henry discuss, but they’re enough to keep you from leaving the book to pick up your phone—a recipe for potential attentional disaster.
Schlesser is exactly the author to tackle a book like this. He’s a professor of art history at the École Polytechnique in Paris, so not only does he know plenty about the works in question, but he has easy access to the three museums Mona and Henry visit in the novel. He can detail not only the works but the physical placements of the paintings and sculptures in the museums. He can tell the reader about the crowds around some works and the lack of popular interest in others, and he can describe the setting of the artwork of the week:
This time, Henry led Mona into a gallery that was striking for its kind of lofty coldness, lacking the immediate seduction of paintings. There were also very few people in the gallery, which was in the Denon wing of the Louvre and which Henry had always felt had two faults: it was more like a passage, a means to access something other than itself; and it was spectral, almost deathly. But this feeling was perhaps fitting for what was on display: sculpture, and more particularly, Italian sculpture of the Renaissance, with its deployment of dark shadows—the bronzes—or pale shadows—the marbles. (64)
A good part of the success of this book is in its structure. After an introduction to the characters and Mona’s medical troubles, the narrative is neatly broken in fifty-two weeks. Each chapter begins with a page or two setting up the narrative frame: Mona’s father, Paul, runs an antique shop that is struggling, and he has been hitting the wine bottles hard. Her mother, Camille, is a part-time office worker who devotes herself to volunteer work, and her husband describes her lovingly as “slightly shambolic.” Mona attends school with her friends and doctor’s appointments with her mother, and she worries about her father’s drinking.
This narrative is brisk and without much detail, sometimes frustratingly so. Characters appear, like the playground bully Guillaume, and disappear from the story. Some of the scenarios are simplistic or cliche, like Mona’s father hiccupping while drunk at his shop. The narrative frame does remind the reader that Mona has a life outside the museum visits, though her days inside the museums are much richer on the page.
Then Henry arrives to take Mona to the artwork of the week. Schlesser is on far firmer ground here. Mona is set up to contemplate the work, and a passage of ekphrasis follows in italic type to describe what she’s looking at. Schlesser’s writing about art is effective; I would think it conjures the images of these works even for audiobook listeners. Take, for instance, his description of a Jackson Pollock painting:
[T]he surface, while being covered in an eruptive and thickly layered mess, was actually quite structured. Not organized or composed—indeed there was neither an identifiable center nor periphery—, but structured by rhythms and an overall coherence. (372)
After several minutes of silent contemplation, Henry asks Mona her impressions of the work, and he confirms and expands on her thoughts with intro-level art history lessons. The pair come to some conclusions as they head back to Mona’s apartment, and maybe a stop for ice cream. Schlesser then neatly threads the theme of one chapter’s artistic discussion into the narrative framing story of the next chapter.
It is easy to follow and hard to get lost, even if the reader were to put down the book for a while. A reader could easily use this as a year-long art history course for themselves, and this method of quiet contemplation of a single work could catch on with readers who find themselves inspired to visit their own local museums, even if they never get to Paris.
That thin plot is this book’s Achilles’ heel, to the point that it strains credulity. When Camille and Paul ask Henry to take Mona to her to appointments with a child psychiatrist so she can learn to cope with the potential trauma of impending blindness, Henry dreams up his art history scheme. He answers Camille’s request:
Agreed, I’ll accompany Mona every Wednesday afternoon. From now on, it’s me, and only me, who is in charge of this psychological therapy. It will be the business of just the two of us. Is that agreed?(30)
Camille makes sure her father will choose a reputable doctor, and that’s good enough. Mona’s parents never ask, over the course of a year, about Mona’s appointments or progress. Mona is occasionally taken to see her ophthalmologist, who believes hypnosis will help somehow, but he never asks to communicate with her psychiatrist to coordinate care. Henry advises Mona to tell her parents that she is seeing a Dr. Botticelli if they ask, but they never do.
It only makes sense that Schlesser writes so carefully about art, given his immersion in the subject and his pedagogical career. That means that Mona and Henry, who are on every page, serve as archetypes of Teacher and Student. This, too, is part of what has made this book so globally successful: the reader finds themselves looking through Mona’s eyes as the Student while Henry elucidates the artworks as the Teacher. This style, however, tends to flatten the characters so that they fill narrative roles rather than human lives. The dialog therefore serves its pedagogical purpose, and Serle conveys in English its somewhat didactic tone, but it doesn’t always sound like a grandfather and granddaughter who have spent a lot of time together:
“The entire paradox of The Age of Maturity [by Camille Claudel] resides there.”
“Really?”
“The emptiness is what hasn’t been fulfilled.”
“Can you explain again?”
“Well, you see Mona, …” (279)
There are also a few stumbles in representation that may trip up some readers, like the blind man begging at the train station who provides Camille with an important lesson about kindness, and then poof: “He’d disappeared.” But the lesson doesn’t stick, since much later in the book she still finds the idea of her daughter going blind “sickening.”
Mona’s Eyes is an enjoyable novel for the armchair would-be art enthusiast, with familiar characters and a light plot line to carry the reader through while maintaining focus on the art. Given its recurring weekly structure, it would be no surprise at all if it were adapted for a streaming series.
Schlesser, Thomas. Mona’s Eyes. Translated by Hildegarde Serle. Europa Editions, 2025.
Kristen Hall-Geisler is a freelance editor and author living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, Heavy Feather, and the Pittsburgh Review of Books, among others. She recently completed her translation of the four-volume memoirs of Céleste Mogador from French.