Mona's Eyes: A Novel

Challenging, interesting, and a reminder to how complex and immense the art world is. The young girl and her grandfather make the story come to life!

When ten year old Mona is suddenly struck blind for sixty three minutes before recovering her sight, her mother immediately schedules an appointment with an ophthalmologist. Equally dumbfounded, he professes, “You have exceptional sight, like no one else, or almost no one else, has. You must use it; you must look at everything, and absorb everything that you see.” But “The threat of blindness was real; it was tangible, physical, and great words, at such times, become really small, minuscule, inaudible, completely dwarfed by the danger to be defied.” When the doctor recommends hypnosis with a child psychiatrist, Mona’s grandfather Henry is incensed. He insists on administering a therapy of a different kind: “once a week, according to an unchanging ritual, he would go with Mona to contemplate a work of art—just one--first in prolonged silence, so the infinite delights of color and line penetrated his granddaughter's mind.” Across fifty-two Wednesdays, grandfather and granddaughter experience fifty-two works of art at the Louvre, Orsay, and Beaubourg, “repositories of what the world has produced of greatest beauty, of greatest humanity…If one sad day Mona became 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.” After extensive investigation, Mona receives a diagnosis for the source of her blindness: it's not of a functional nature, but actually one of generational psychotrauma, an abyss accessed only through a hybrid of hypnosis and the healing power of art. “Her face lit up-she understood why her grandfather had taken her to the museum. That was the point of all those visits, from the start: for her to archive herself through the beautiful works he'd chosen for her, for her to archive mentally these treasures, and for them to remain forever her reservoir of colors and joys, should blindness catch up with her one day.” This coming of age novel chronicles Mona’s metamorphosis from elementary to middle school, childhood to adolescence over the course of a year of art sessions. Like Frida Kahlo’s Two Fridas, Mona’s evolution could be depicted as two Monas, so close and so distant who would, however, have agreed on one fundamental thing: at the center of their hearts stood this semaphore of a grandfather, this monument, their adored rock. Like the striations on a rock or layers of oil on a portrait, Henry, Mona, and the story itself are comprised of dark layers of color. In attributing symbolism to each part–grief, joy, growth, violence, and healing–Mona detects both the allegorical, moral, and sacred potential in the beholding of art and in the art of being. “Forget the negative, my darling; keep the light forever inside you.” Thomas Schlesser’s Mona’s Eyes is a literary masterpiece.

Mona’s Eyes sets out to turn a race against blindness into a meditation on art, beauty, and what it means to truly see the world. Each Wednesday, a grandfather escorts his granddaughter through Parisian museums offering her a final tour of great works before her sight disappears. It sounds tender and promises intimacy. What unfolds feels far more like a masters level lecture series than a 10-year-old granddaughter building a relationship with her grandfather. Every chapter follows the same formula. Mona’s parents argue. Mona tries to apply whatever philosophical lesson she learned the day before. Her grandfather skips what should be actual medical care and takes her to a museum instead. Then Mona delivers some wildly advanced insight that sounds like it came from a tenured professor. Mona never feels real. Not for a second. She asks questions no kid would ask and responds in ways that feel unnatural. I kept thinking, has this author ever interacted with a child before? Mona is written less as a ten-year-old girl and more as a vessel for philosophical commentary. Her questions, insights, even her reactions to losing her vision feel detached from any recognizable childhood experience. It creates a strange distance. The grandfather made it worse. I could not get past how irresponsible his choices felt. Your granddaughter is going blind and your solution is to skip appointments and go stare at paintings? The book tries to frame this as meaningful and beautiful, but it reads as selfish and honestly a little cruel. The art itself becomes the main character. You can tell the author knows his stuff. The descriptions of the art don’t match the depth of the information. The result feels like standing in a gallery while someone recites facts at you instead of inviting you to look. Don’t even get me started on the euthanasia presentation. A ten year old giving a structured breakdown of the pros and cons of human euthanasia to her class? I’m sorry, what? Then the plot takes a turn that made me physically pause. Mona isn’t going blind in the way we’re led to believe. The blindness becomes tied to this emotional fixation on her necklace. Suddenly we’re dealing with something that feels more symbolic and psychological. I was in disbelief and forcing myself to finish the book by the time we reach the ending. This is where Mona lets go of the psychogical attachment she has to the necklace and magically stabilizes by focusing on love and connection with her living family. Mona's Eyes wants to be profound. It attempts to explore beauty, grief, and how we hold onto the world when it starts slipping away. When the characters don’t feel real and their choices don’t make sense, all that philosophy starts to feel hollow instead of meaningful.

Beautiful and inspiring. A must read!

It is a beautiful story. I love the close and sweet relationship between Mona and her grandfather. The story shows the importance that grandparents have in the lives of their grandchildren. Grandfather wanted Mona to have colorful memories if she lost her sight. Art history is very prevalent in the novel. There are chapters that are difficult to get through listening to the audio book due to the art history. I believe reading the book is the better choice. I am glad that I listened to “Mona’s Eyes.”