Our Reading Journey
In our Fall 2026 session, we opened a case file. Florence, 1557: the painter Pontormo lies dead at the foot of his unfinished frescoes in San Lorenzo, and in his studio someone has found a canvas that could bring shame on the Medici. Everything we learn comes to us in letters, from Vasari, from an aging and cantankerous Michelangelo, from Pontormo's pupil Bronzino, from a nun who paints, from duchesses, spies, and a queen of France watching from a distance. There is no narrator to tell us whom to believe.
That absence made detectives of us all. Each week, the group sorted the correspondence like evidence: who is writing to whom, what each one wants, what each one cannot afford to say. Binet's best idea is to marry two forms that seem made for each other once you see them together. The epistolary novel has always multiplied points of view, as readers of Les Liaisons dangereuses know, and crime fiction lives on testimony that may or may not be true. Put them in the same book and every letter becomes both a clue and a performance, written for a particular reader and shaded by self-interest. Reading becomes cross-examination, and the pleasure lies as much in catching a correspondent in a half-truth as in following the plot.
Underneath the murder lies a second question, and it was the one we found most dizzying. Who did it? But also: who painted it? Vasari, after all, practically invented art history as a series of attributions, lives of artists linked to the works they signed. Binet lets the search for a culprit and the search for an author slide into each other until it becomes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. We could not help thinking of our own moment, when texts and images can be produced without anyone quite having made them, and the question of who is behind a work has become, once again, a real historical problem.
About the Author
Laurent Binet (born in 1972) and taught literature for a decade before turning to fiction. His first novel, HHhH, about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, received the Prix Goncourt du premier roman in 2010. La Septième Fonction du langage won the Prix Interallié in 2015, and Civilizations, a counter-history in which the Incas conquer Europe, the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 2019. Perspective(s) (2023) received the Prix du roman historique, and Sam Taylor's English translation appeared in 2025. Each of his books changes form while circling the same questions: who tells a story, and with what right.