Thomas Schlesser · 2024 · overland
Thomas Schlesser's 2024 bestseller, set in present-day Paris. After ten-year-old Mona suffers a frightening bout of temporary blindness, her grandfather Henry decides that, should she lose her sight forever, she will at least carry a reservoir of beauty within her. Each Wednesday for a year he secretly takes her not to a therapist but to the great museums of Paris, where they study one masterpiece at a time. The route circles three of the world's finest galleries.
- 1Montreuil
In the family's flat in Montreuil, on the eastern edge of Paris, young Mona briefly and inexplicably loses her sight, and her grandfather Henry resolves to fill her eyes with beauty while there is time.
- 2The Louvre
Their secret year begins at the Louvre, where week by week they stand before Botticelli, Leonardo, Vermeer, and the old masters, Henry teaching Mona to truly look.
- 3Musee d'Orsay
They move on to the Musee d'Orsay and its Impressionists, Manet and Monet and Van Gogh, learning to read movement, light, and feeling.
- 4Centre Pompidou
At the Centre Pompidou they reach the modern and the strange, Picasso and Kandinsky and Basquiat, and Mona, perhaps facing darkness, gathers a lifetime of seeing.