THE MONUMENTS OF PARIS

Stories of the “great men,” told by a woman in their family.

Huisman—whose last novel, The Book of Mother (2021), chronicled the turbulent life of her mercurial mother—returns to autofiction, here reanimating the lives of her paternal relatives through a deep dive into archives, memories, and imagination. Returning to France in 2020 after two decades abroad, Huisman encounters a diminished version of her father, now elderly and near death, rather than the invincible “academic-businessman” who left a trail of wives, ex-wives, mistresses, and eight children (born to four different women) in his wake. Tracing the details of the bourgeois, privileged upbringing her father enjoyed, Huisman also sifts through the ephemera and records of her grandfather Georges Huisman’s experiences, describing years when he was both politically important and, then, nearly ruined during World War II. Huisman, whose own mother referred to her husband as “a little Jewish around the edges,” reports the toll her Jewish ancestry cost her father and grandfather in a stoic recitation of the antisemitism boiling over in Vichy France. Armed with information supplied by an academic who studied her grandfather’s life (and whose real identity appears in the acknowledgements), Huisman delves, creatively, into an area of Georges’ life clouded by time: a long-term relationship with Choute, his mistress. According to family legend, Huisman’s father, 11 years old at the time, refused to leave wartime France with Choute and Georges when offered the opportunity to escape to the U.S. or Britain—sans the rest of the family. (Whether the story is apocryphal is alluded to by Huisman in her reference to a “composite of fact and fiction.”) While Choute has vanished into history, her influence provides material for a thoughtful raconteur like Huisman to illuminate historical experience through imagination.

Another artful family dissection performed by Huisman.