The Monuments of Paris

by Violaine Huisman

A remarkable novel drawn from life about a Frenchwoman’s efforts to come to terms with the legacy of her father and grandfather, 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, bipolar mother —the subject of Huisman’s acclaimed debut novel The Book of Mother —and her iconoclastic, flamboyant father, whose self-dramatization made him a formidable raconteur and a questionable parent. The one constant in her father’s personal narrative was his obsession with 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, Huisman transforms these complex layers of history into a moving fiction 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 he once again tells the story of his father’s rise and fall during the Second World War, Violaine becomes herself obsessed with this myth of her grandfather Georges—and with the nearly erased story of the most significant of his many mistresses, a beautiful and aristocratic woman named Choute, who bears a strange resemblance to her own mother. 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.

Genres: Fiction, Paris, France

240 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication April 14, 2026

About the author

Violaine Huisman was born in Paris in 1979 and has lived and worked in New York for twenty years, where she ran the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s literary series and also organized multidisciplinary arts festivals across the city. Originally published by Gallimard under the title Fugitive parce que reine, her debut novel The Book of Mother was awarded multiple literary prizes including the Prix Françoise Sagan and the Prix Marie Claire.

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought I would love this book. As with the book's narrator, my mother is French but settled in the United States as an adult after WWII. (My mother also returns to Paris, where the streets are akin to talking monuments from her childhood and prompt memories and mysteries of her mother's illustrious pre-WWII career in Paris's creative sector). I studied in France, and my return visits with my Parisian relatives are also laden with nostalgia and the desire to uncover ancestral history. However, I could not get into this book. Had I not been reading a complimentary pre-release version of it for NetGalley, I would have put it aside about a third of the way through, something I rarely do. The plot does not have a lot of drama, which would be fine if the characters had been more sympathetic. The narrator returns to France to spend time with her dying father, with whom she has a complicated, troubled relationship. Her father was a compulsive womanizer and a failed academic, and he had his own complicated relationship with his father (the Huisman whose name may be known to Francophiles). The narrator also has a complicated relationship with her emotionally unstable mother. Much of the story is told through her recollections triggered by her returns to Paris. I was surprised to find that I was not very interested in the characters. I also found that the narrative dragged and I was frequently bored. The names of some of the personages mentioned in the book were familiar to me, but for the average American, British, or Australian reader, I suspect that they will be unfamiliar. There was a lot of name-dropping, but for most English readers, the names and the era are unlikely to be compelling enough to pull them through the book. I wish I could give this a five-star review, but unfortunately, this book did not do it for me.

[Janine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book I think is auto fiction but I felt more like it was really a memoir because all the names and dates match up a lot with the author’s father, Denis Huisman and her grandfather, Georges Huisman. Her father’s obituary that I found through some digging referred to him as “an iconoclast, an unclassifiable, flamboyant Balzacian character.” Her grandfather was discovered during her author’s research after her father’s death was an historian, activist, founder of the Cannes Film Festival and associated with the French government pre WWII.

Denis is really an unlikable man. His flagrant affairs and disdain for them doesn’t lend well to father material in my estimation, though the author has great love for him. Georges, the father, was as much of a profligate as his son. Let’s remember this was not a period of gender equality (or is there any time?). These liaisons must have been hurtful or to the women cheated on and I think the author trying to bring that out in this book.

Both men were associated with many leading French politicians of their time. In fact much of the book reads well historically for the WWII period - I’m not as familiar with the French history of this time - and as history buff I enjoyed this.

I tried to figure out what made this fiction and came upon a French review that posited the parts that included Georges’s mistress, Choute de Troguindy, were probably “a mixture of archives, memory and pure fiction.” This helped me bring together how this is a novel.

This book is so beautifully written. It reveals a time in history and the mores of a country at that time to light. I think this is the purpose of this book - to bring us to a space where we can envision ourselves and connect to others.

I’d like to thank NetGalley and Penguin Press for allowing me to read this ARC.

[Caroline Segal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un peu trop hagiographique. Écriture souvent trop familière.

[Virginie Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quelle vie et quelle famille ! Attachant et sincère.

[AnLor · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pas convaincue. Une passion de l'auteur pour sa famille qui ne m'a pas plus emballée que ça. De grands moments d'ennui.

[Nils Borkey]

Maintenant la vie de son père et du côté de son père