The Monuments of Paris: Rewriting Family History with Violaine Huisman

Following the international success of The Book of Mother, which explored her beautiful, bipolar mother’s life, Violaine Huisman turns in her latest novel, The Monuments of Paris, to two towering figures at the center of her family story: her father and her grandfather, exploring the myths and contradictions that shaped her inheritance and whose legacy continue to shape French cultural life.

Her father, Denis Huisman, emerges as a larger-than-life figure, “an iconoclast, an unclassifiable, flamboyant, Balzacian character,” while the story of her grandfather, Georges Huisman, is that of a man shaped by the meritocratic ideals of the French Republic: a Jewish civil servant, leading cultural figure of 1930s France, and founder of the Cannes Film Festival. From the gilded halls of the Élysée Palace, he rose to the highest levels of the state before losing everything under the Vichy regime, stripped of his position, dispossessed, forced into hiding, and nearly erased from history

Reconstructing a past she did not witness, Violaine Huisman draws on archives and family narratives to trace a path from power to dispossession, weaving in Proustian figures where the record falls silent, and blending historical precision with literary mastery.
This conversation will be followed by a Q&A, a book signing, and a reception.

In person event in English.

“An enthralling view into a family’s mysteries.” — Publisher’s Weekly
“Another artful family dissection performed by Huisman.” — Kirkus
“Violaine Huisman explores and contests the myths surrounding the great men of her family, using fiction where the official archives fall silent. The Monuments of Paris is a moving elegy for her accomplished, mercurial, outrageous father—and a beautiful act of disobedience.” — Ben Lerner, author of Transcription and The Topeka School[
“In Violaine Huisman’s captivating novel, the real monuments of Paris are not its buildings, but its people—a grand, multigenerational family saga, blending the history of France with intimate personal narratives.” — Anne Berest, author of The Postcard

Longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize
A New York Times Notable Book
A Library Journal Best Book of 2021
Prix Françoise Sagan and the Prix Marie Claire.
"Marvelous... superbly effective. One develops a soft spot for many of Huisman’s characters, despite their hideous and sometimes criminal behavior..."—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
"Huisman initially narrates from her childhood perspective, then zooms out to cover the whole of Maman’s life..."— The New Yorker, In brief
"A prize-winning sensation in France, Huisman’s witty, immersive autofiction showcases a Parisian childhood with a charismatic, depressed parent."— Oprah Daily
“That the madness of Violaine’s childhood left her 'deeply marked' is both hardly in doubt and not the subject of this tender, searching book...”— New York Times Book Review
"Camhi’s translation from the French of Huisman’s debut novel conveys Violaine's steady compulsion to understand..."— Kirkus, starred

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

French Library / Alliance Française of Boston & Cambridge, 53 Marlborough Street, Boston, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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