Mona’s Eyes: Thomas Schlesser’s Gift for the Holidays

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Schlesser’s character Henry Vuillemin quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince.   

“There’s nothing more truly artistic than to love people,” Henry Vuillemin quotes Vincent van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo in 1888. 

Mystery, suspense, art, and family dynamics await the reader of Thomas Schlesser’s ambitious novel about a 10-year-old Parisian girl who suddenly and inexplicably loses her eyesight for 63 minutes. In this innovative and captivating story, Mona’s parents, Camille and Paul, take their stricken child to an ophthalmologist who, unfortunately, cannot detect the reason for this episode. Unable to reassure the family that this bout of temporary blindness will never recur, or worse, result in total blindness forever, the doctor recommends more testing and taking Mona to a psychiatrist. Mona’s parents comply, enlisting Mona’s beloved maternal grandfather, Henry Vuillemin, to oversee these weekly therapy sessions.   

Henry is Mona’s “Dadé,” a very special person in her life.  For Henry, a doting grandfather, the possibility of Mona losing her eyesight permanently imposes an urgency to fill her memory bank with beauty. He immediately devises a plan for their Wednesday afternoons together. Rather than go to a psychiatrist, they would visit a museum to concentrate on only one work of art each week for one year: 52 weeks, 52 objects. His art history curriculum begins at the Louvre, then continues at the Musée d’Orsay, and ends at the National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou (a.k.a. Beaubourg). His mission is to give his cherished grandchild the gift of remembering visual treasures that impart valuable life lessons before she can no longer see them.   

Unusually tall and slim, Henry “radiated a wonderfully alluring vigor and intelligence” and a bit of scariness, too, according to Mona’s friends. He had a deep scar along the right side of his face, from his cheekbone to the eyebrow above it, and one blind eye, an injury from a wartime attack during one of his photojournalist assignments in Lebanon in 1987. That Henry’s one good eye and wealth of knowledge help Mona develop extraordinary visual acuity underscores Schlesser’s introduction to the art of looking, deciphering, clarifying, and understanding. For Mona, the journey is from darkness to illumination, ignorance to enlightenment. 

Schlesser’s Gift: The Art of Receiving 

The novel begins with a prologue that introduces the constellation of characters and Dadé’s secret plan to ignore Mona’s parents’ wishes in order to give his granddaughter a world of exceptional beauty, one artwork at a time. Fifty-two chapters follow, each doling out advice to Mona and the reader.   

What does the Mona Lisa say? It’s not Mona Lisa who speaks, but the artist Leonardo da Vinci who made her. Through his famous portrait of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, Leonardo reminds us to “Smile at Life.”  

And what does Michelangelo communicate to us through his Dying Slave? “Liberate yourself from the material.” This subjective approach to art is Thomas Schlesser’s gift to his reader. It offers us permission to imagine the artist fashioning a work that delivers advice about life and how to live it. Yes, we should learn the academic facts, but we should also let go of restricting our minds to one point of view. Rather, we should look at a work of art for a very long time, silently, waiting for the artwork to tell its own story.

The first visit to the Louvre features Sandro Botticelli’s glorious Venus and the Three Graces Presenting Gifts to a Young Woman (1483-1486), a delicately painted fresco transferred to canvas, located in the museum’s Italian galleries. A rather quiet painting among the more celebrated portraits and sacred images by numerous great Renaissance masters, this lesser-known Botticelli is often ignored by crowds racing toward the “Mona Lisa room,” several feet ahead and off to the right of this enormous hall. Because this painting rarely commands attention, we should pay close attention to what Schlesser wants us to glean from this particular work of art. 

In this meticulously detailed fresco, we see softly flowing gowns clothe elegant fair female deities gathered in a group of four facing one lovely blond maiden. Purple, green, silvery white, peachy pink, and golden yellow sway on the goddess Venus and the Three Graces–Aglaea (radiance), Euphrosyne (joy), and Thalia (youthfulness in flower), who accompany her. In the lower right corner, a small boy enters the scene. It is Cupid carrying his bow. His quiver and arrows seem to have been erased from this damaged surface. The allegorical retinue gathers to offer the young female mortal their precious gifts. Unfortunately, the object is indecipherable, erased by the removal of a whitewash that once covered this lively composition. Art historians believe Venus clutches a bouquet of roses in her rounded fingers, positioned just above a cloth held open by the regal female recipient dressed in expensive crimson. 

The young woman may be Giovanna  Albizzi, who wed Lorenzo Tournaboni in 1486, the date of this fresco. Painted on a wall of the Tournaboni’s Villa Lemmi, it was at some point covered over by white paint that was removed in 1873. The Louvre acquired the fresco in 1882. 

Mona contemplates the fresco for a long six minutes before her conversation with Henry/Dadé begins. He contextualizes the work, informing her in precise, erudite language about this Florentine artist and the world that belonged to this painting.  Finally, Henry asks Mona to consider what the artwork means. Mona is stumped, and Henry eventually decodes the message: “What this fresco is saying is that we have to learn to receive, that human nature, to be capable of great and beautiful things, must be ready to embrace the kindness of others, their desire to give pleasure, to embrace what it doesn’t yet have, and what it isn’t yet. There’ll always be time for the person receiving to give back, but to give back, that’s to say, give again, it’s crucial to have been capable of receiving.” 

This passage reveals Thomas Schlesser’s ultimate purpose for this book, his second novel. We, the readers, along with Mona, are the receivers of Henry’s gifts and others, which the reader will discover throughout the narrative. Are we sufficiently open to fully engage in Schlesser/Henry’s rigorous art history course? Are we prepared to absorb 52 nuggets of wisdom available to the perceptive viewer of these great works of art? Thanks to his character Mona, we have a partner to help us slog through the challenge.  

And challenge there is as Schlesser/Henry teaches us how to look at art, how to analyze it, and how to detect the artists’ intentionality, communicated through their choices of colors, line, technique, and imagery. All well and good from a typical art historian’s perspective. But then Schlesser opens another door, granting us permission to dive deeper into the gold mines of art. As the omniscient author, he tells us: “Henry also knew that, to penetrate the secret power of genius, one mustn’t always follow the conventional path of specialists.”

Henry encouraged Mona to consult her intuition as well as her observations. By observing Henry and Mona’s ritual of contemplating silently and then sharing impressions freely, we learn how to patiently spend time with a work of art, searching for encoded messages that may have eluded the academics who write art history textbooks and museum text panels. This style of contemplating art is also Schlesser’s gift to the engaged reader. 

The Author 

Thomas Schlesser, PhD, is the director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation, a professor of art history at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and the author of Faire Rêver, Anna-Eva Bergman: Luminous Lives, and numerous scholarly articles. His myth-busting books on the rebellious, 19th-century Realist Gustave Courbet refreshed this artist’s reputation in the 21st century.   

As we follow Mona and Dadé from one work to another, chapter by chapter, we realize Schlesser has composed an art history curriculum that offers training in academic methodologies taught by art history professors and textbooks: formal, iconographic, historical context, biographical, political, psychological, and feminist, among others.  The formal analysis comes from the author himself, Schlesser, who carefully and evocatively describes the work of art, performing the ancient Greek art of ekphrasis, creating a work of art by describing or referencing a work of art (demonstrated in John Yeats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”).  

In the guise of his character Henry Vuillemin, we learn about the context and circumstances under which the artworks were made. We also learn about the iconography, the meaning of the depicted individual figures and objects. Iconography is usually established through research, such as finding textual sources or cultural constructions available to artists during their lifetimes. 

Having completed the usual academic exercises, Schlesser surprises us by going one step further. He has Mona guess what the artist wants to tell us. A conversation between Henry and Mona follows until Henry pronounces the artist’s advice, a gift from the Beyond. Over the course of the novel, Mona becomes more perceptive and daring in her thinking. Her adoring grandfather encourages her to free associate as they both determine the artwork’s valuable life lessons, which are written at the beginning of each chapter. This device, intertwined with a narrative about Mona’s school life, her parents, her friends, and her doctor, as well as the mystery of her deceased grandmother Collette, culminates in the book’s ultimate message: the transformative power of receiving, letting go, and receiving again. 

Mona’s grandfather Henry is also a homage to Schlesser’s own grandfather André Schlesser, a well-known cabaret singer known by the stage name Dadé. With several friends, he founded and performed in the famous Cabaret L’Écluse (1951-1974). One might wonder if the playfulness between Mona and Henry mirrors the author’s conversations with his own Dadé as well as his father, Gilles Schlesser, a celebrated French writer in his own right.

The Art History Curriculum 

Schlesser’s novel may seem reminiscent of Josten Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, originally published in Norway in 1991, then translated into English by Pauline Moller for Farrar, Straus, Giroux in 1994. This popular novel introduced readers to philosophy through a series of letters sent to a young girl from a mysterious source. In Schlesser’s work, the young girl receives art history lessons from someone with whom she shares a special bond. The development of their relationship during the course of the novel is especially significant for the plot and the readers’ edification. Henry, we are told in the first chapter, takes his grandfatherhood very seriously, to the extent that he read Victor Hugo’s The Art of Being A Grandfather, and knows it by heart: “the cardinal principles of communication [are] it matters little if you don’t instantly understand all that someone says, as though each new word had to be an already leafy tree in the vast orchard of the brain. Buds would be sure to open when the time was right, as long as furrows have been dug and seeds sown.”

These wise commentaries should inspire us to read the novel slowly and thoughtfully, as we eavesdrop on Mona and her grandfather’s candid impressions of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (1503-1519), Rembrandt’s Self Portrait (1660), Goya’s Still Life with Sheep’s Head (1808/1812), Courbet’s Funeral at Ornans (1859 and 1850), Frida Kahlo’s The Frame (1938), Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1983), and Pierre Soulagues’ Painting 200 x 220 cm, April 22, 2002, among so many other magnificent works of art.   

Please note that Schlesser’s art history curriculum is limited to European, English, and American artworks, from the Renaissance through 2002. Most of the artists are very well-known, but not all the artworks. For example, Schlesser chose Vermeer’s Astronomer (1868), instead of The Lacemaker (1669-1670), one of the Louvre’s popular works, according to Elaine Sciolino in her brilliant book Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Great Museum (2025).   

Thankfully, Schlesser includes several women artists, who are not well known to the general public. For example, we learn about Marguerite Gerard and her charming The Interesting Student (c. 1786), and Marie-Guillemine Benoist and her striking Portrait of Madeleine (1800), which recently benefited from the Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition about the Black model in 19th and 20th century French art, by receiving a new title that identified the sitter. Its previous title was Portrait of a Black Woman. 

Schlesser’s decision to have Henry embolden Mona and to delight in her unself-conscious, spontaneous, and sometimes subversive ideas and antics is also the author’s gift. It’s a reminder to let go of limiting our dependence on conventional interpretations and to trust our own instincts informed by a shared humanity with the artists whose talents brought us, through the ages, to this moment of receiving their extraordinary gifts of art.    

Some readers may wonder why Henry doesn’t take Mona to the Musée Guimet for Asian art, or the Arab World Institute for Middle Eastern and North African art, or to the Musée du Quai Branly for African and Oceanic art, Native American art, and Pre-Columbian art? Schlesser’s Henry also ignores the Louvre’s rich collection of antiquities, including superstars the Victory of Samothrace and Venus de Milo, both from the 2nd century BC, and its magnificent Islamic art. I imagine Schlesser chose specific works of art that fed the overall narrative of Mona’s Eyes. They underscore Mona’s personal journey as she reaches a more mature 11 years old by the end of the novel. 

The Translation 

I fell in love with Thomas Schlesser’s novel in French, Les Yeux de Mona, winner of the Prix Musanostra 2024, from the very first page. The language flows lyrically as we learn to pay acute attention to detail and visual perception.  

Selected as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year 2025, the English version of the novel was translated by Hildegard Serle, whose name is not on the cover, as it should be.  The novel has been translated into 38 languages. I am not as enthusiastic about the English translation and would love to hear from you, dear reader, after you read Mona’s Eyes in English, with or without access to the original French. Please tell me about your reading experience. Did you like the book? Did you anticipate the surprise ending? 

A Great Gift for the Holidays 

I highly recommend Mona’s Eyes or Les Yeux de Mona as a gift for your loved ones. It’s not only a moving story, but it’s also the gift of beauty and valuable advice to live by.