A luminous fusion of art and verse that finds penetrating new insights in sacred traditions.
Biblical characters grope their ways toward psycho-spiritual enlightenment in this illustrated work.
Weill retells three stories from the book of Genesis, subtly inflecting them with psychoanalytic and existentialist motifs. The first is the advent of Adam in “the garden of now”—Eve never appears—where his task is to complete the act of creation by seeing and naming the things in the world, a metaphor for a child’s efforts to gain awareness as an independent being. Upon eating the fruit of the tree of Evil and Good, Adam becomes aware of his failings and is expelled from the garden of now and “tossed into history” and “suffering.” The author continues to the story of Cain, whose murder of his brother, Abel, embodies the psychic conflicts of adolescence. Cain tries to define himself by putting his own desires for love, fame, and power over his regard for others, although he worries that it’s all a meaningless fracas that ends only in death. His personal moral crisis plays out against images of war, tyranny, and religious antagonism. The soulful book’s third part meditates on the story of Abraham’s readiness to obey God’s commandment to sacrifice his son, Isaac, only to be stopped at the last moment by an angel. The episode is a turning point that leaves Abraham fully mature and capable of freely defining himself through moral choice. Weill’s beguiling text unfolds in simple, poetic lines, limpid and earnest. (“When Cain stands at the mirror to examine his face / and he peers into eyes of concern, / he fears his existence is a mechanical race / that there is nothing to win and nothing to earn.”) The author pairs the text with knotty yet lyrical illustrations that usually foreground a man, often in a business suit, engaging pensively with an uncertain landscape—gazing into mirrors, trudging along railroad tracks toward an unknown destination, or hula-hooping when the way forward becomes clearer. Painted in pastel washes of color and populated with whimsical, cartoonish renderings of everything from dinosaur skeletons to ice cream cones to a minimalist caricature of Gandhi, Weill’s visuals bring out the work’s themes in surprising and delightful ways.
A luminous fusion of art and verse that finds penetrating new insights in sacred traditions.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0985800321
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Jean-Pierre Weill Studios
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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