Readers who can't afford an art history degree or a museum tour of Paris will get an excellent survey course with Mona's Eyes, a richly informative novel by art historian Thomas Schlesser, translated from the French by Hildegarde Searle. Ten-year-old only child Mona is drawing polygons in her family's Montreuil apartment when she suddenly goes blind. The blindness lasts for only 63 minutes but is frightening enough to warrant tests. When a physician recommends that Mona see a therapist every Wednesday, Mona's mother asks Henry, Mona's grandfather, to take her. Without telling Mona's parents, however, Henry takes her instead to three of Paris's museums, the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, and the Centre Georges-Pompidou, commonly known as the Beaubourg, so that if Mona goes permanently blind, "she would at least have the benefit of a kind of reservoir, deep in her brain, from which to draw some visual splendors."
What follows in this singular novel are 52 chapters, each one dedicated to one work of art. Henry describes each week's piece in loving detail, including the artist's background and the relevant techniques, including da Vinci's use of sfumato in the Mona Lisa to Courbet "combining registers, the dramatic and the comic," in A Burial at Ornans (1849-50). If this all sounds like an excuse for Schlesser to rhapsodize about art, that's because it is. If he's stingy with plot, he's generous with history, with long, erudite descriptions and reproductions of each work inside the jacket cover. Aesthetes are going to love this book, and rightly so. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer