The Monuments of Paris

A remarkable novel drawn from life about a Frenchwoman’s efforts to come to terms with the legacy of her father and grandfather, both powerful forces who left a mark on their country’s culture but whose incorrigible womanizing also left a complex mark on their wives and children.
Violaine Huisman grew up in Paris with her beautiful, often hospitalized, manic-depressive mother—the subject of Huisman's acclaimed debut novel The Book of Mother—and her iconoclastic, flamboyant, Balzacian character of a father, a larger-than-life figure whose paternal love for his youngest daughter was as dramatically narcissistic as it was untrustworthy. The one constant in her father’s personal narrative was always his obsession with the story of his childhood during the Vichy regime in France and of his father Georges, long dead, a Belgian Jew whose heroic and tragic biography had taken on the trappings of family myth. In The Monuments of Paris, Violaine Huisman has transformed these complex layers of history into an elegant and moving novel about exile and belonging, about the lies families are built on and the truths they hold dear.
As the novel opens, “Violaine” returns to Paris from her adopted home of New York City to visit her dying father for the last time. And as his conversation once again obsessively circles the story of his father’s rise and fall during the war, Violaine, who always felt herself and her mother to be exiles within their own clan, becomes herself obsessed with this myth of her grandfather Georges – and especially with the nearly erased story of the most significant of his many mistresses, a beautiful and aristocratic woman named Choute. With the help of a local historian, she sets out to hunt down the truth as it might be known, and in so doing creates the necessary and deeply compelling fiction that is this singular book.
In prose as elegant as it is precise, The Monuments of Paris draws a haunting portrait of twentieth-century France through the outsized ambitions, infidelities, and tragedies of the author’s own family, both real and imagined.

Violaine Huisman