PERHAPS in French this novel is insightful about art and family psychology, but in English translation it is a clunky mélange of cardboard characters, behaving improbably and spouting clichés about Old Masters.
Mona, the titular heroine, is a ten-year-old girl, who temporarily loses her sight, and may — for reasons sketchily explained — have only one more year of vision left to experience. Or Mona’s condition may be psychological, a reaction to the troubled marriage of her parents, Camille and Paul. Paul runs a precarious business selling American memorabilia and likes to drown his sorrows with a drink or three, while Camille is a “model employee” at a temp agency, holding family life together.
Into this domestic fog strides Camille’s father, Henry, known as Dadé, a retired war reporter with an eye patch, telegraphing the action and horror that he has seen, and meaning that he must know a thing or two. Conveniently for the plywood plot, what Dadé knows is that his granddaughter’s condition would respond better to seeing art at the Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, and Beaubourg than attending her weekly psychologist appointments. In Mona’s Eyes, depriving a child of medical attention is presented as the heroic course of action.
So begin the 52 Wednesday visits to famous artworks in Paris galleries, where Mona’s practically mute agreement with Dadé’s leaden pronouncements confirms his diagnosis: “Henry wasn’t entirely sure what Mona meant by that, but he had noticed her unusual ability to perceive things, an almost magical power of analytical discernment.” Some children have the very rare musical gift of “absolute pitch”, and Mona seemed to be endowed with a kind of “absolute vision”.
But Mona’s vision falls short of offering X-ray-level scrutiny, allowing Dadé to give yet another awful art-history lecturette in front of a Frida Kahlo portrait at the Beaubourg: “No,” Henry teases her, “you’re talking nonsense because the Mona Lisa isn’t a canvas; Leonardo painted it on a fine panel of poplar. And this painting isn’t on canvas either: the self portrait is painted on a sheet of aluminium, and combined with what’s known as fixé sous verre, or ‘reverse painting on glass.’”
The kindest interpretation for Mona’s Eyes is that its art-historian author, Thomas Schlesser, wanted to communicate his enthusiasm for art to a wide audience, and hoped that fiction was the right form. Yet, even the cover of the English version strikes a duff note, as Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring hangs in the Hague, not Paris. If only Dadé had put them right.
Susan Gray writes about the arts and entertainment for The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, and the Daily Mail.
Mona’s Eyes
Thomas Schlesser
Europa Editions £20*
(978-1-78770-585-2)
Church Times Bookshop £18
*paperback due out on 2 July, £10.99 (£9.89); 978-1-78770-658-3