Watching Over Her Imaginative and Moving

 

 

 

 

Watching Over Her (2023 in French, 2025 in English translation)

By Jean-Baptiste Andrea

Simon & Schuster, 584 pages.

★★★★★

 

Watching Over Her won a Prix Goncourt for the best and most imaginative work of the year when it was released in France in 2023. It has subsequently won other awards. English readers are now lucky enough to be able to read it, courtesy of an excellent translation by Frank Wynne. It is a long novel, but an amazing one that transports us to the early decades of the 20^th century.

 

It opens in an Italian monastery in 1986 with a man on his deathbed. He is Michelangelo Vitaliani, a dwarf whose name is nearly as long as he. Vialiani is Italian and made his reputation there, but he was born in France and, much to his chagrin, was often called “Il Francesa.” He called himself “Mimo,” partly to escape the burden of his first name. (That Michelangelo bore the surname Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni and since his death in 1564, has been considered as perhaps the greatest artistic talent of the Renaissance.) It was also Mimo’s fate to also be a sculptor.

 

At birth it wasn’t clear that he would much of anything. His family was mired in poverty, his mother was absent, and his father died of venereal disease contracted from a prostitute during World War I, and no other family member wanted Mimo. After all, who wants a dwarf? In the not-quite-modern world of 1916 Europe, folk tales held that dwarves were bad luck. His father left money for his upkeep, but his first “guardian” passed him on to another who put him to work as a stonecutter. One useful thing his father left him was an ability to carve stone and Mimo quickly surpassed the skills of his fellow workers and masters.

 

Watching Over Her often feels as if it were pulled from The Canterbury Tales. The “her” in the title is Viola Orsini, the bohemian daughter of a proud aristocratic family. They come to each other’s attention when Mimo and other members of “Uncle” Alberto’s crew are working on the Orsini estate. Alberto is not Mimo’s uncle, nor does his dwarfism repulse Viola, as she too is an outcast. As Mimo fashions things in stone, Viola takes it upon herself to fashion his intellect one book at a time. They rendezvous in a cemetery, as her parents would be appalled to see her spending time with a diminutive tradesman. Those meetings in the graveyard are the genesis of one of the oddest and most unpredictable relationships in recent literature. One could call it lovers-not-lovers.

 

Reversal of fortunes is a common literary trope, but that between the Orsinis and Mimo is akin to twin glass elevators, with that of the Orsinis descending as Mimo’s ascends. He soon does commissions for the Orsinis, sups at their table, and smokes Orsini cigars, but is never considered as match for Viola. Mimo also sculpts for the church, which makes him one of the most celebrated artists in all of Italy. That’s rather amusing, as Mimo is more sinner than saint. As his purse bulges, much within it is spent on drink and rental women, though he always yearns for the unattainable Viola. She, in turn, becomes a family pawn as she reaches marriageable age. Think of them as each other’s oddball guardian angel.

 

Do not, however, expect any old-fashioned happy ending. Where Waiting For Her departs from the aforementioned Canterbury Tales vibe is that the 1920s into the1940s are the age of Mussolini in Italy. How does a cash-poor noble family like the Orsinis respond to the often vulgar Il Duce? For that matter, what does a famous sculptor like Mimo do when fascists wish to employ him? To again reference Chaucer, Waiting for Her is also a morality play. If you will, events also tends to bring the glass elevators to the same level.

 

How many books hinge on how the promise of youth is sullied by adult realities? Author Jean-Baptiste Andrea has written something more complex, a novel of great humor, bridled passion, burning ambition, and deep sorrow. In this (sort of) love story, the question of who do you love stumbles over the query what do you love. 

 

#NetGalley 

#WaitingforHer 

 

Rob Weir

Note: This book is scheduled to release in February, but you might want to pre-order it now. It's an amazing work and rumors are that it will be available earlier.