With four films and five novels to his name, it is the latter that have earned Jean-Baptiste Andrea the highest accolades. Watching Over Her is his most successful, published in France in 2023 and scooping the prestigious Prix Goncourt.
The novel opens in 1986 with the elderly Michelangelo “Mimo” Vitaliani on his deathbed in a remote Italian monastery. Despite being beyond speech, he is able to silently recall his extraordinary life. Andrea returns us to this death scene in various chapters but mostly concerns himself with the fortunes of Mimo, who’s also known as Il Francese because he was born in France.
Mimo does not feel himself to be French. He describes his family: “We thought Italian, which is to say larded with superlatives, frequent invocations of Death, copious tears and hands that were rarely still. We cursed as one might pass the salt.” Already an outsider because of his birthplace, Mimo is further distanced by his achondroplasia, or what used to be called dwarfism. Mimo is 4 foot 6, and, unusually for the condition, is powerfully strong, which is fortunate because he becomes a famous sculptor. The descriptions of how marble is worked into life-like, affecting works of art is one of the book’s strongest aspects.
At more than 500 pages, the novel is epic, sprawling. There is a lack of narrative tension, but its filmic nature propels the story from scene to scene, decade to decade. Andrea’s skills as a screenwriter and director are demonstrated here, landscape and location being vividly described, though not always to the work’s advantage.
Overriding in the story is Mimo’s love for Viola Orsini, the only daughter of a wealthy landowning family near Pietra d’Alba, a real area in Piedmont. Viola is set on autonomy, mostly stymied by her conservative mother and dominating brothers and father. At the rise of fascism in the 1920s, she is full of loathing. In the 1930s, her nascent feminism is demonstrated in a conversation about male violence and the spelling of Man with a capital: “There is no man with a capital M. You’re all men with tiny little Ms … women direct our violence against ourselves because it wouldn’t occur to us to make someone else suffer … there is something about me that even you can never cure. It is this: I am a woman and I don’t give a damn.”
As teenagers, Viola and Mimo make a vow of everlasting friendship and spend time lying on graves in the local cemetery while Viola endeavours to listen to the dead. Mimo observes “her femininity lay not in her curves but in the sensual austerity of their absence … the eyes beneath the tousled shock of raven hair were almost too big …” When Mimo reaches manhood and his art takes him to Florence and to Rome, and when Viola periodically rejects him, he never ceases to hanker after her. This does become a little strained.
Other characters include the violent drunkard Zio Alberto, a sculptor of minimal talent to whom Mimo is apprenticed. It was Mimo’s mother who sent him from France to this uncle, and mother and son do not see one another again until the 1940s. Late in the novel, when they are reunited, a sketchy paragraph tries to cover loss and change “… time had eroded too much. A certain stiltedness meant I was less affectionate, but she patiently accepted this.” There is an occasional lack of intimacy with Mimo, the film-maker’s action taking place in the foreground, without enough depth of field.
Through the rise of fascism, Mimo’s fortunes rise and fall. Like many little people of the era, he works for a time in a circus. Audiences pack in every night but he finds the show, where he and the other performers attempt to escape standard-sized performers in dinosaur suits, humiliating.
But he finds companionship there and learns about sex. “Since that grey, tender morning, I have known that when a woman lies under a man, whether on the docks in Genoa in the back of a lorry or on a fairground, it is to soften his fall.”
In some ways, the novel is like a myth or fairy-tale: the appealing dwarf, the evil uncle, the mysterious aspects of Viola in her determination to fly and her apparent ability to transform into a she-bear. The greatest sculpture of Mimo’s life, the Vitaliani Pietà, has power that “brings us closer to the divine”. It is seen as dangerous because “God’s greatness cannot be approached directly … if Man could connect directly with God … then what is the point of the Church?”
The full sweep of the 20th century, world wars and political and cultural changes, is here. There is the murder of socialist Giacomo Matteotti by Mussolini after he challenged fascists in the Italian Parliament. There is the creation of Reale Accademia d’Italia, with its president, proud of being the “first Fascist in the field of radio telegraphy”. There are enjoyable and fascinating references to real works of art, and to the early Italian film industry.
We are seeing a frightening return of totalitarian regimes. Historical novels often reflect the concerns of the contemporary writer, and so perhaps it is of little surprise that this compelling novel has been clasped to the French bosom, selling more than 700,000 copies.
Watching Over Her, by Jean-Baptiste Andrea (Atlantic, $37.99), is out now.
