T (Paris, 1977), art historian and director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation, publishes in Catalan and Spanish Els ulls de Mona (Empúries/Lumen, 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 touching 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 the beauty, the grandfather takes her every week, for a year, to see a single painting. Together they tour the Louvre, the Orsay Museum and the Pompidou Center. Schlesser spoke to La Vanguardia after a visit to the Musée d’Orsay during which he explained various paintings with erudite knowledge, delight and passion.
His work explains the history of art and the history of humanity. Isn’t she perhaps too ambitious?
He is absolutely right. It is a novel that aspires to be total. There are the three stories of this girl, in school, in the medical field and in the family, including the relationship with the grandfather, and then, through the works that he teaches her, a history of art, a history with capital letters, focused on Western Europe in general, and a bit of a retort the history of philosophy. What I really wanted to do is to intertwine all these levels. Maybe it’s too ambitious, but I remember a phrase, I think by André Gide. He said that if you dream big things, you might be able to do small ones.
Does art, culture in general, have therapeutic, healing properties?
I would tell him that I take pain, suffering and illness too seriously to be able to claim that art can heal. I think saying that would be an overstatement. Art can console, which is already a lot. Art can above all 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 heal. That would be giving false hope to those who are really suffering.
The paradox is that, as he says in the book, many artists had psychological problems.
Yes, it’s true. Not only psychic, but also physical. Poussin trembled non-stop, Goya was deaf, Monet went blind… And then, many psychological problems. Van Gogh, without a doubt, Louise Bourgeois, who suffered a lot in her childhood. Indeed, they extracted a kind of transcendence from all these sufferings and were very vitalistic, which is very beautiful. We were not just given a lesson in merely aesthetic contemplation. What they bring us is a true existential philosophy. Yes, he is very right when he emphasizes that very painful or traumatic things happen in his biographies.
You say that your interest in art stems from poetry. Can you give us 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 it very well. I read it out loud in my room. And this allowed me, in the course of my life, to know many poems. When they are read aloud, the 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 all of this, because he sometimes explores norms that collide with classical norms. That’s how I got the taste for poetry and those first moments of artistic sensibility.
You dedicate the book to all the grandparents in the world. That’s cute. Do you think that this close relationship with grandchildren is in danger because of modern life, because you live far away?
I don’t think he’s in any danger. This novel has allowed me to talk to a lot of people. I realize how much the grandchildren, between the ages of 5 and 15, adore their grandparents, and the grandparents adore their grandchildren. This marks people’s lives in a very lasting way. It’s a topic that’s rarely talked about. That’s why I’m so 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 youngest and the oldest, above the parents. Parents are obviously very important to their children and vice versa, but there is mutual pressure. With grandparents everything is more open, freer. The rules are more relaxed. That’s why a lot more things happen than with parents.
The book is also a reflection on loss. It is said that “learning life is learning loss”.
Yes, we think that living is learning to earn, gain material goods, gain 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 that is experienced is when you go from 10 years to 11 years. You get to collège (secondary school) and you think you’ve won, but in reality you lose a great continent that is childhood. What’s amazing is that we don’t even have time to turn around and say goodbye to childhood. One feels, intuitively, one is in the intoxication of change, and later, when one reviews one’s life, one realizes that, indeed, the first loss that teaches us that everything will always be lost, is the loss of childhood But Henry (the grandfather) explains it well to Mona: if there wasn’t the repeated experience of saying goodbye to life, things wouldn’t have the extraordinary intensity they do. Because everything is constantly lost, life is wonderful. Otherwise, it would be boring. There wouldn’t be this urgency to live.
Why is he talking about euthanasia?
It’s a topic that interests me a lot and I’ll tell you why. I have not lived this experience in my environment. But euthanasia allows us to place at the heart of society an immense debate about pain, what does a society do with pain. Since the 19th century it has been a big issue, with the birth of painkillers. Then palliative care began to be given importance, to everything related to pain, human, animal, suffering. The question of euthanasia links all this.
You propose another way to visit museums. Mona and her grandfather see only one play each week. This is a luxury. They are usually crowded. Do you think people make mistakes when they visit?
No, everyone can visit them as they wish. People shouldn’t be blamed if they want to run through the great gallery of the Louvre, like Jean-Luc Godard’s Band a apart. They are free to do so, with or without their mobile phone, as they wish. What the book says is that there is also another option that can be explored: seeing a single work at a time, for a long time, and getting involved in it before explaining it.
His book is reminiscent of The World of Sofia, by the Norwegian Jostein Gaarder. Was it an inspiration?
It’s not an inspiration, but I read The World of Sofia around the time I took my high school exams. Although I find two big differences. The first is that my book is pierced by melancholy. We don’t see this in Sofia’s world. And the second thing is that Sofia’s world focuses on philosophy. Mine is truly about art in the service of life.
