Thomas Schlesser (Paris, 1977), art historian and director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation, publishes in Spanish and Catalan Mona’s Eyes (Lumen/Empúries, on sale March 7), his first novel, translated into 26 languages. The work is already a literary phenomenon and has climbed to the top of the fiction sales rankings. It is a moving story of the relationship between a ten-year-old girl and her grandfather. Mona is in danger of going blind. So that her eyes can capture all her beauty, her grandfather takes her every week, for a year, to see a single painting of her. Together they tour the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and the Center Pompidou. Schlesser spoke with La Vanguardia after a visit to the Musée d’Orsay during which he explained several paintings with scholarly knowledge, delight and passion.
His work explains the history of art and the history of humanity. Isn’t she perhaps too ambitious?
Is right. It is a novel that aspires to be total. There are three stories of this girl, in school, in the medical field and in the family, including the relationship with her grandfather and then, through the works that he teaches her, a history of art, a story with capital letters, focused on Western Europe in general, and a bit of the history of philosophy. What I have really wanted to do is the interweaving of all these levels. Maybe it’s too ambitious, but I remember a phrase, I think it was from André Gide. He said that if you dream of big things, maybe you can achieve small things.
Does art, culture in general, have therapeutic, healing properties?
I would tell him that I take pain, suffering and illness too seriously to say that art can heal. I think that would be excessive. Art can console, which is a lot. Above all, art can reveal to us that our frailties are our strengths. So in this sense art is a wonderful instrument to have a community of spirit, between living beings and between them and the transcendent. But I have too much respect for doctors to dare to say that art can cure. That would be giving false hope to those who truly suffer.
The paradox is that, as it says in the book, many artists had psychological problems.
Yes it’s correct. Not only psychological but also physical. Poussin trembled incessantly; Goya was deaf; Monet went blind. And then psychological problems. Van Gogh, without a doubt, Louise Bourgeois, who suffered a lot in her childhood. Indeed, from these sufferings they extracted a kind of transcendence and were very vitalistic, which is very beautiful. They didn’t just give us a lesson in simply aesthetic contemplation. What they give us is a true existential philosophy. Yes, you are right to emphasize that very painful or traumatic things happen in their biographies.
You affirm that your interest in art comes from poetry. Can you give more details?
When I was a teenager, when I was 12 years old, in 1991, I was a bad student, I had been for a long time, but I found in poetry a consolation and, above all, a freedom. He was a bit of a turbulent boy, but behind that he loved all the ranges of emotion that poetry offered. At the age of 12 I started reading Guillaume Apollinaire. I remember very well. I read it aloud in my room. And that allowed me, in the course of my life, to know many poems. When you read them aloud, your voice and mouth end up absorbing them. In poetry he found the simple idea that freedom of language allows freedom to be created in the mind. Apollinaire was perfect for that, because he sometimes explores norms that clash with classical norms. That’s how my taste for poetry came to me and those first moments of artistic sensitivity.
You dedicate the book to all the grandparents in the world. That is beautiful. Do you think that such a close relationship with your grandchildren is in danger due to modern life, because you live far away?
I don’t think he’s in danger at all. This novel has allowed me to talk to many people. I realize to what extent grandchildren, between 5 and 15 years old, adore their grandparents, and grandparents adore their grandchildren. That marks people’s lives in a very lasting way. It is a topic that is talked about very little. So I’m very proud of that in the book. It is a very original question in literary terms. There is a universality of the strength of the bond between the generation of the little ones and the elders, above the parents. Obviously parents are very important to their children and vice versa, but there is mutual pressure. With grandparents everything is more open, more free. The rules are more relaxed. That’s why many more things happen than with parents.
The book is also a reflection on loss. It is said that “to learn life is to learn loss.”
Yes, it is believed that living is learning to earn, gaining material goods, gaining experience, but it is not true. To live is to learn to lose. It is the central reflection of the book. And the first real loss you experience is when you go from 10 to 11 years old. You get to college (secondary school) and think you have won, but in reality you lose a great continent that is childhood. What is incredible is that you don’t even have time to turn around and say goodbye to childhood. You feel, intuitively, that you are intoxicated by change, and later, when you review your life, you realize that, in fact, the first loss that teaches us that everything will always be lost is the loss of the childhood. But Henry (the grandfather) explains it well to Mona: if there were not the repeated experience of saying goodbye to life, things would not have the extraordinary intensity that they have. Since you constantly lose everything, life is wonderful. Otherwise, it would be boring. There wouldn’t be that urgency to live.
Why do you talk about euthanasia?
It is a matter that interests me very much and I will tell you why. I have not lived this experience in my environment. But euthanasia allows us to put into the heart of society an immense debate about pain, what a society does with pain. It has been a big issue since the 19th century, with the birth of painkillers. Then importance began to be given to palliative care, to everything related to pain, human, animal, suffering. The question of euthanasia ties all of that together.
You propose another way to visit museums. Mona and her grandfather see only one play each week. That’s a luxury. They are usually overcrowded. Do you think people make mistakes when they visit them?
No, everyone can visit as they wish. People should not be blamed if they want to run through the great gallery of the Louvre, as in Jean-Luc Godard’s Band Apart. They are free to do it, with or without their cell phone, as they want. What the book says is that there is another option that can be explored: it is to see a work every time, for a long time, and get involved before explaining it.
Your book remembers Sofía’s world. Was it an inspiration?
It’s not an inspiration, but I read Sofia’s World when I took my high school exam. Although there are two big differences. The first is that my book is crossed by melancholy. We don’t see that in Sofia’s world. And the second thing is that El mundo de Sofía focuses on philosophy. Mine is truly about art in the service of life.
