This month, we’re reading the latest in French literature, with a pair of novels that channel old philosophical traditions into new perspectives on the country today.

The Monuments of Paris: A Novel

Violaine Huisman (Penguin Press, 240 pp., $28, April 2026)

This month, we’re reading the latest in French literature, with a pair of novels that channel old philosophical traditions into new perspectives on the country today.

The Monuments of Paris: A Novel

Violaine Huisman (Penguin Press, 240 pp., $28, April 2026)

Denis Huisman, the larger-than-life character at the heart of The Monuments of Paris, is drawn from the real-life academic of the same name—a personality, according to his 2021 obituary in Le Monde, “worthy of Balzac.” Huisman, an academic-turned-entrepreneur, made his name in France with the Dictionnaire des Philosophes, a bestselling 1984 primer on philosophers throughout history that was beloved by students and mocked by the academy. Some living philosophers penned their own entries—including Michel Foucault, who in his description of his work, “distinguished between the author function and the author person, a distinction still controversial at a time when the term autofiction had just been coined.”

So writes Huisman’s daughter, the novelist Violaine Huisman. The younger Huisman is known for her autofictional work, and in The Monuments of Paris, she probes the limits of the form, sifting through fact and fiction to make sense of her illustrious yet pained family history and leaning lavishly on imagination where the archives are silent.

At the novel’s start, “Violaine,” the narrator, has just moved back to Paris—after two decades in New York—to care for her father at the end of his life. He’s a grandiose and contradictory figure—a gourmand, a raconteur, a devoted family man, and an inveterate womanizer, someone who may have helped introduce “new philosophical vocabularies” but was “not interested in ideas.” He had spent his early years growing up in the Élysée Palace while his father, a Belgian Jew, was a senior French official. The family’s dispossession and exile during the Vichy years are subjects that “Denis” returns to often in his monologues, especially in his old age.

These are the stories, told and retold by her father, that Violaine cannot fully parse: Did her grandfather really found the Cannes Film Festival, only to be stripped from the official record? Could this historical infelicity actually be connected to her grandfather’s mistress (and her cat) taking the final seat in the........

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