Watching Over Her
Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s immense, powerful novel – Watching over Her – won the Prix Goncourt when it was first published in French in 2023, a well-deserved accolade. Its English translation by Frank Wynne was published in August 2025.
This novel is so many things: it is an unusual love story; it is a historical epic exploring 20th-century Italian history and the rise of fascism; it is a disquisition on art, religion and politics; and it is a sprawling family saga documenting a time of huge social change.
The first-person narrative centres on Mimo Vitaliani, a sculptor living in the Sacra di St Michel near Turin. The story opens in 1986 when Mimo is dying. The novel then shifts back in time for Mimo to tell his story from his birth in 1904. En route, Mimo strikes an unlikely friendship with the aristocratic Viola Orsini.
The writing is superb, and the narrative time shifts are deftly handled. Suspense is exceptionally masterful, outcomes of key events often tantalisingly denied until later. The writing is always beautiful. Stone is a repeated image, from the Romanesque monastery columns to the ‘faded pink’ stone of the landscape to the monumental architecture of fascism. Characterisation is detailed and believable, with characters revealed in all their complexity and contradictions.
The blending of the storyline and historical events is skilfully done. The characters are caught up in wider issues and their responses are key to the way the story develops. The world is also often seen in terms of art: the frantic Futurist vibrancy of Turin; the hazy pointillist landscape of Liguria. This culminates in the central image of the Pietà, both Michelangelo’s and Mimo’s.
The story gripped me from start to finish. The cataclysmic ending is unexpected, poignant and deeply satisfying. This is writing of the first order.
