WATCHING OVER HER, by Jean-Baptiste Andrea; translated by Frank Wynne
Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s “Watching Over Her” is one of those novels that emerge from France every so often as both a literary and commercial phenomenon. It has sold more than a million copies in its home market, won the Prix Goncourt in 2023 and has been translated into more than 30 languages. With its success, Andrea, a filmmaker and novelist in his 50s, joins a cohort of contemporary French writers, among them Laurent Binet, Leïla Slimani, Mathias Énard and David Diop, whose work has found a broad international readership.
This is a novel structured around movement and stillness. It opens in 1986 in an isolated monastery in northern Italy. A man is dying, surrounded by a group of monks. He is Michelangelo “Mimo” Vitaliani, a (fictional) sculptor affected by dwarfism (“Instead of making me tall, strong and handsome, God had made me short, strong and handsome”). From this scene, the narrative ranges restlessly across the 20th century, reconstructing an extraordinary life through a series of feverish recollections.
The other point of stillness is a statue hidden in the monastery crypt: the Pietà Vitaliani, carved by Mimo at the height of his powers. We learn that he was perhaps the greatest sculptor of his age, responsible for one of its most celebrated and controversial works. Other sculptors — Brancusi and Giacometti among them — make brief appearances, acknowledging their inferiority to Mimo.
Born in France in 1904 to an impoverished family of Italian immigrants, Mimo loses his sculptor father early in World War I and is sent, age 12, to live in Italy with a man he calls Zio Alberto — not, in fact, his uncle — who treats him brutally. Mimo’s talent emerges swiftly, however, and he finds himself working at a grand estate in the rose-colored Ligurian village of Pietra d’Alba, a setting part “Gormenghast,” part “Garden of the Finzi-Continis.” It is here that he meets Viola, the daughter of the Marchese and Marchesa Orsini. Viola becomes the central figure in his life, the inspiration for his greatest work and the name on his lips as he dies.
In the last two decades or so, there have been a number of capacious novels whose protagonists bounded from one moment of 20th-century drama to the next: William Boyd’s “Any Human Heart,” Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life,” Paul Auster’s “4 3 2 1.” Andrea’s recalls something older, though. The carnivalesque quality of Mimo’s life brings to mind Michel Tournier’s “The Erl-King,” one of the great French novels of the postwar period.
Like Tournier’s lumbering protagonist Abel Tiffauges, Mimo is a man marked by physical difference who becomes both an observer and an unwitting participant in the machinery of fascism. Both protagonists combine innocence with complicity, insisting on political neutrality even as they serve authoritarian regimes. Tiffauges photographs children for the Nazis; Mimo carves monuments for Mussolini. Both claim allegiance to art rather than ideology. Both are lying to themselves.
The comparison extends beyond theme to structure and tone. Andrea shares Tournier’s interest in myth and legend, in figures who exist at the margins of society and therefore become distorted witnesses to history. Both novels adopt the picaresque, sending their protagonists careening through catastrophe with an almost fable-like quality. And both ask how much agency their heroes truly possess: Are they acting on history, or merely borne along by forces they barely understand?
Unlike “The Erl-King,” Andrea’s novel, smoothly translated here by Frank Wynne, is less concerned with metaphysical resolution than with human attachment. Its emotional and imaginative center lies not in Mimo’s solitude, but in his bond with Viola Orsini.
Viola is no ordinary muse. A scientist and an inventor with a photographic memory, she dreams of flight like the poet-pilot Gabriele d’Annunzio. Her parents, however, expect her to marry well and reproduce. The “repulsive little creature” who crashes into her bedroom while repairing the roof is not their idea of a suitable match. Yet Viola and Mimo become what Viola calls “cosmic twins”: contrarians yearning for a new world, bound by intensity rather than sex. Their relationship is tumultuous and defined as much by long separations as by closeness.
From Pietra d’Alba, Mimo’s trajectory takes him to Florence, where he works in the shadow of the Renaissance, and then to Rome. The Orsini family remains central to his evolution. Viola’s brother Francesco, initially a trainee priest, rises to become a senior cardinal and draws Mimo into the Vatican’s artistic orbit. Another brother, Stefano, ascends through the fascist hierarchy and pulls him into political art.
Mimo insists that he has “no truck with politics,” a claim that rings increasingly hollow as he sculpts monuments for the regime. Andrea presents this development less as moral collapse than as the inevitable consequence of lofty ambition, part of Mimo’s desperate desire to live and think “like an Orsini.”
Andrea is interested in the interaction between life and art, and in the breadth of experience required to produce greatness. Mimo’s trajectory provides that breadth in abundance, and it finds its full expression in the Pietà. Many of those who encounter the work are struck by “a powerful emotion followed by feelings of suffocation, tachycardia, dizziness,” a response that speaks to the sculpture’s unsettling force and mythic status. It is one of the few pieces by Mimo to survive what one critic refers to as his “almost preternatural ability to get himself into trouble.”
The novel is also rich in secondary characters, from the lazy, Machiavellian Stefano to Mimo’s childhood friend and fellow craftsman Vittorio and Vittorio’s otherworldly twin, Emanuele, who speaks in tongues and dresses in scavenged uniforms. Together they populate what is ultimately a love song to a country of contradictions: battered, divided, misguided and miraculous. This is an Italy where life is performance, where circuses rise on wasteland, where beauty is perpetually imperiled and genius proliferates unchecked.
In the end, “Watching Over Her” is less concerned with judgment than with entanglement. Andrea suggests that the Pietà Vitaliani cannot be separated from the life that produced it; that ambition, evasion and desire matter just as much if not more than talent. For a novel to sustain this ambiguity is a measure of its seriousness and spirit.
WATCHING OVER HER | by Jean-Baptiste Andrea | translated by Frank Wynne | Simon & Schuster | 368 pp. | $29
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