Jean-Baptiste Andrea won France’s most prestigious literary award in 2023 for his novel Watching Over Her (Veiller sur elle). Simon & Schuster released it January 6 in the States, translated by Frank Wynne. It’s the French novelist’s fourth novel after A Hundred Million Years and a Day. That novel captivated me, the story of a university professor who hears about a dinosaur fossil buried in an Alpine glacier and sets out to find it. It’s why I’m eager to read Watching Over Her.
The story is about a sculptor named Mimo dying in an Italian monastery. He’s lived there for decades among the monks, who “watch over his masterpiece, an arresting statue that haunts all who see it.” More from the novel’s description:
During his final hours, he reveals his life story: his impoverished childhood, brutal apprenticeship, and, most important, his meeting with Viola Orsini, the only daughter of a powerful and dangerous aristocratic family. Mimo and Viola are instantly drawn to one another, viewing themselves as outsiders—Mimo, for his dwarfism, Viola for her ability to remember everything she has ever read or experienced.
Something to keep in mind: I read somewhere – either in a blurb or a review – that it takes a few pages to hit the “I can’t put this down” point.
Jean-Baptiste Andrea began his career in film before writing books, which accounts for the extraordinary, vivid scenery in his novels.
I don’t gravitate toward absurd literature, but given I’ve raised corgis all my adult life, I can’t resist The Hitch. Published this month, the story kicks off when a Newfoundland attacks and kills a corgi. Nathan, a six-year-old boy, witnesses the event, and mysteriously starts barking, overeating, and talking to himself. His parents are vacationing in Mexico, so he’s with his Aunt Rose for the week. All this according to the novel’s description, which says Aunt Rose “mistakes [Nathan’s] behavior as repressed grief over the corgi’s death.” Nathan, however, believes the corgi’s soul “leaped into his body.” Aunt Rose needs to get things back to normal before the parents return from Mexico. She, btw, is described as a woman of “exacting standards” who’s an “anti-racist, Jewish secular feminist eco-warrior … convinced she knows the right way to do everything.”
This definitely belongs on the absurd bookshelf, but I’m also thinking, hoping, it’s hilarious, especially being we’re told the novel is “a delightfully unhinged comedy.” If it succeeds, it could be just the laugh-out-loud escape I’m looking for.
The Longest Chapter 