Mona's Eyes
Mona's Eyes
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Transl. Hildegarde Serle on Mona's Eyes
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why they wrote it
A crisis, an imagined child, a decade of raising herA note before this section begins: all primary interview material in the sources comes from Thomas Schlesser. Hildegarde Serle, who translated the novel from French into English, appears only in publication credits and in one brief comment from Schlesser. No first-person statements from Serle exist in any source here. This document reflects Schlesser’s perspective alone, and Serle’s pronouns cannot be inferred; they/them is used throughout. Schlesser has declined to name the crisis that started the book, but its emotional weight shaped everything that followed. The premise of a child threatened with blindness grew directly from his need to imagine a figure whose loss would be unbearable, and Mona herself, the ten-year-old at the novel’s center, became that figure over the decade he spent writing.
The initial spark came from a difficult moment in my life — a personal trial, as everyone experiences at some point. I prefer to remain discreet about it, but it gave me the impulse to imagine Mona: an idealized child I developed freely in my mind — intelligent, witty, sensitive, modest, empathetic.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Thomas Schlesser”The emotional architecture of the grandfather-granddaughter relationship at the book’s center has a real model, though the character of Henry (Dadé) was constructed rather than drawn from life. Schlesser has described a simple, non-intellectual maternal grandmother who opened the world to him through Bizet’s Carmen, and the refinement of feeling he learned from her. The question is what that inheritance cost him when he tried to put it on the page.
Chapters after chapters, I realized that Mona’s Eyes, which is not autobiographical at all, but was really the concentration of all the emotions of my childhood. [paraphrased from audio]
The distinction matters: the novel borrows no events from Schlesser’s life, but it borrowed everything from his emotional memory. The decade of writing was also, by his own account, a decade of excavation.
Schlesser has also described the ten-year writing process in terms that collapse the distance between author and character. He noticed after finishing that the duration of the project matched exactly the age of the child he had invented.
She’s 10 years old in the novel, and it took me 10 years to write it, almost as if I had been raising her during that time.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Thomas Schlesser”How they wrote it
Narrowing the frame, testing every chapter against feelingThe book that exists is a narrower book than the one Schlesser began in 2013. Early drafts included architecture, cinema, and art from outside Western traditions. He cut the non-Western material not because it didn’t matter but because a handful of examples would have been, by his own judgment, worse than none.
I would say that the English version is better than the French one, thanks to the beautiful job of my translator. [paraphrased from audio]
What remained after the cuts was governed by a classical structural constraint: unity of time (52 weeks), unity of space (Paris), three acts moving through the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Pompidou Centre. Schlesser has described this as moving through the novel like a tragedy.
One painting entered the book after most of it was already written. Marguerite Gérard’s The Interesting Pupil had only recently been acquired by the Louvre, and Schlesser had not known it existed when he began. The chapter it displaced has no published form and no title now.
I was so flabbergasted by the quality of this painting, I decided to replace another painting by this one in one chapter. [paraphrased from audio]
Across ten years of drafting and revision, Schlesser held to a single editorial test. It required no external reader and no checklist of craft criteria: only his own body’s response to what he had written.
Every time I felt that I was likely to cry or likely to laugh, I told myself, ‘This is good. I can keep it.’ [paraphrased from audio]
From the beginning, Schlesser designed the book so it could reach readers who cannot see. Accessibility for visually impaired readers shaped the prose from the start, not as an afterthought. The Braille edition launched at a Paris institution for blind people, with the French Culture Ministry present, an event Schlesser has described as a political moment of inclusion.
The ekphrasis (that is to say, the very precise descriptions of each artwork) became my way of translating paintings into words, attempting to convey their presence through language alone. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I had to try.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Thomas Schlesser”On what’s at stake
Whether art actually protects anyoneThe grandfather Henry sends Mona through the museums of Paris because she may soon lose her sight and he wants to fill her with the world’s beauty before that happens. His logic is clear, but Schlesser has been careful to preserve the doubt underneath it: art has served fascism as well as liberation, and the novel holds that fact alongside the grandfather’s faith.
She could become blind. And before maybe becoming blind, the grandfather wants her to put in her head all the beauties of the world. And where are the beauties of the world? In the museums, indeed. [paraphrased from audio]
Schlesser is an art historian who has spent a career studying what art can and cannot do. The novel is not a corrective to that professional skepticism. It is a test of it. The artworks appear in chronological order, each selected for a specific lesson: self-knowledge through Rembrandt, the condition of animals through Rosa Bonheur, heartbreak through Camille Claudel. What the lessons add up to, for Mona specifically, the reader does not know until the final pages.
Mona’s Eyes is not a novel ‘about art’ but rather a coming-of-age story in which art is at the service of life. It embodies Robert Filliou’s beautiful idea that ‘art is what makes life more interesting than art.’
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Thomas Schlesser”Schlesser has pushed back against the idea that knowledge and feeling compete in a reader’s experience of art. He wants Dadé’s art-historical context to function not as a brake on emotion but as its accelerant, and he has been direct about what he hopes readers carry away from each museum chapter.
I don’t think that there is an opposition between knowledge and emotions. I think they are always combined in brain... I hope when you will read Mona’s Eyes, you will feel that all the informations the grandfather is able to provide will serve your own emotion. [paraphrased from audio]
What they want us to sit with
The readers art wasn’t supposed to reachThe Braille edition and the reception it generated have become, for Schlesser, the clearest signal that the book’s central gamble paid off. The novel was written so that someone who has never seen a painting could still feel its presence through prose alone. He has named the responses he received from visually impaired readers as the measure of the book he is proudest of.
Today, the exchanges I’ve had with visually impaired readers are among the most moving rewards of this publication.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Thomas Schlesser”Schlesser launched the Braille edition at a Paris institution for blind people, with the French Culture Ministry in attendance. He has described the event as a political moment of inclusion, and the pride he takes in it is not incidental to the book’s argument: a novel about a child threatened with blindness, written so that blind readers could encounter it on equal terms, is making the same argument with its form that Dadé makes with his museum visits.
I am very, very proud of this Braille translation and of that inclusive aspect of the book. [paraphrased from audio]
The question the novel leaves open is the one Schlesser refuses to answer for the reader: whether the beauty Mona has been given is enough to carry her through what comes next. He has noted that Louise Bourgeois’s claim that art guarantees sanity can be read ironically, and that he does not resolve the ambiguity. Readers have to earn the ending themselves.