Micro Review 51

 

I, Mona Lisa by Natasha Solomons (Cornerstone)

I love books with interesting narrators and as this one is told from the point of view of the painted Mona Lisa I was quickly drawn in.

The conceit is that Da Vinci was such a skilled painter that he actually created a sentient being with the Mona Lisa and so this book is actually her autobiography.

This Mona Lisa was firmly in love with Da Vinci and the bulk of the book is her recounting her life with him during Renaissance Italy and France. After his death we hear smaller parts of what happened to her/the painting in pre Revolutionary France, during her theft/kidnap at the start of the twentieth century and then how she was kept hidden from the Nazis during World War Two.

Because this Lisa had few people to talk to (exceptional artists/art lovers can also hear her, as can one other painting by Da Vinci) during these latter historical periods there is less detail in them and I did want to know more about them in a historical sense.

Solomon's Mona Lisa is quite a snob, very scathing and acerbic and also very unimpressed with most of the people who came to see her through history. At the same time she is quite amusing and her view point on history is different from other historical fiction set in similar time frames (such as The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone).

I feel that I would be one of the people that Mona Lisa would disparage as when I did see the painting in Paris she was smaller than I expected and hard to see because of the crowds, I never got close enough to see her in detail and failed to fall under her spell. The room was full of people trying to take selfies with her even before the camera phone became ubiquitous. I was much more impressed with the picture she was looking at...

Many thanks to Cornerstone and Net Galley for my advance copy of the book, it is published later this month.