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The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas
Ten years after Edgar Degas’ 1872 visit to New Orleans, a lost sketchbook surfaces. His Creole cousin Tell -- who lost her sight as a young woman -- listens as her former child-servant describes the drawings and reads Degas’ enigmatic words. It’s both cryptic and revelatory, leading Tell to new understandings of her marriage, her difficult, brilliant cousin Edgar, her daughter Josephine, and herself.
164 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2017
About the author
Harriet Scott Chessman
8 books55 followersHarriet Scott Chessman's acclaimed novels include The Beauty of Ordinary Things, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, Someone Not Really Her Mother, The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas and Ohio Angels. Her fiction has been translated into eight languages, and featured in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Good Morning America.
She has also created the librettos for two operas, "My Lai" and "Sycorax."
She has also created the librettos for two operas, "My Lai" and "Sycorax."
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
September 14, 2017
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: Ten years after Edgar Degas' 1872 visit to New Orleans, a lost sketchbook surfaces. His Creole cousin Tell -- who lost her sight as a young woman -- listens as her former child-servant describes the drawings and reads Degas' enigmatic words. It's both cryptic and revelatory, leading Tell to new understandings of her marriage, her difficult, brilliant cousin Edgar, her daughter Josephine, and herself.
***THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANKS JON!***
My Review: In the spirit of full disclosure, Harriet is my social media pal and the best of friends. It's unlikely I'd've published a negative review of the book under those circumstances, but equally unlikely I'd be so disrespectful as to puff up a book I did not enjoy. If you can't say anything nice, say nothing, is the tack I take on reviewing books by friends.
Luckily for the world, I absolutely adored reading this book. I have the good fortune to have seen a number of Degas's works in person, and I am familiar with New Orleans and its culture from years of contact with it and its practitioners. As I was reading the book, I'd come across things that spoke to me of the unique place that New Orleans is.
It's not necessary to spell it out in blocks of visual data. In this case, as the narrator has lost her sight, it would be deeply suspect to do so. But what New Orleans is, in the end, is a place of the heart and soul more than a physical entity. New Orleans is either your home or it isn't, and you're aware of the answer from the second you arrive. It is undeniable and it is for life: You're a yat at heart or the magic is lost on you.
The magic is lost on me.
That doesn't mean I don't get it, though. I get what draws people to the place. I think Chessman's words vivify the spell of New Orleans as much as they limn the landscape of art. The narrative device of a lost sketchbook filled with New Orleans's grace and beauty by one of the leading artists of the time read to a blind woman relative of that artist by one of the subjects of his art is delightful. It requires no effort to understand...and that's the highest compliment I can offer a writer irrespective of the genre in which she works. Framing devices are too often part of a Conversation With The Reader. I don't appreciate that kind of story. I want you to lift me out of my comfy reading posture and transport me to your story's locale without making blaring announcements like a train's conductor does.
And that is Harriet Chessman's gift.
In a passage tesserated from simple words, the complex conceit of the book takes shape. Telly, our blind point of view character, vivifies the world Chessman creates for us to inhabit. Telly is never obtrusive...she isn't the point of her own story, how typically female...she talks to us like she's across the tea table, she chats with us as she would any friend come to wile away an afternoon. It becomes more and more obvious to the reader that Telly inhabits her time with her cousin Edgar as old people inhabit their past. She is the mother of young people, she is the wife of a good man, and she is blind. She is blind in her eyes and she is blind in her heart and she gropes for understanding at every turn, physical or psychical.
Over the course of these 130-ish pages, I felt myself adjusting my reading speed to expand my pleasure in Telly's company. Odile and Honor came to feel like intruders, not one a beloved child and the other a welcome visitor. I was jealous of the attention they commanded from Telly. How silly, I'd tell myself, as annoyance whipped through me at Telly addressing one or the other. As it happened, Edgar, to whom Telly speaks in her memories of the past, elicited no such response from me. I was, instead, a full participant in Telly's relationship to her glamorous Parisian cousin.
I love reading books where I am that fully engrossed, carried out of the 21st century. It's a pleasure to be made that transparent to one's own eyes. I recommend this read to anyone looking for an immersive experience that won't require an entire month to read but will leave food for thought to keep you ruminating for months to come.
The Publisher Says: Ten years after Edgar Degas' 1872 visit to New Orleans, a lost sketchbook surfaces. His Creole cousin Tell -- who lost her sight as a young woman -- listens as her former child-servant describes the drawings and reads Degas' enigmatic words. It's both cryptic and revelatory, leading Tell to new understandings of her marriage, her difficult, brilliant cousin Edgar, her daughter Josephine, and herself.
***THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANKS JON!***
My Review: In the spirit of full disclosure, Harriet is my social media pal and the best of friends. It's unlikely I'd've published a negative review of the book under those circumstances, but equally unlikely I'd be so disrespectful as to puff up a book I did not enjoy. If you can't say anything nice, say nothing, is the tack I take on reviewing books by friends.
Luckily for the world, I absolutely adored reading this book. I have the good fortune to have seen a number of Degas's works in person, and I am familiar with New Orleans and its culture from years of contact with it and its practitioners. As I was reading the book, I'd come across things that spoke to me of the unique place that New Orleans is.
Honor reads a description of the city of New Orleans. Edgar appears to have written this on the eve of his departure. I almost can't listen, caught and struck as I am by some of the images: the city as a huge sleeping cat,
washed and clean, or foul; something about Lake Pontchartrain's beauty. Something "glittering," something "humming." Lemon trees and orange trees. People of all colors. It moves me, in the wake of Edgar's despair,
to discover in his own words how much he cherished about this city I love so much, in spite of all. What might have happened if he could have stayed, for a summer, another winter? Could he have felt healed? Could he have found comfort? Maybe even love?
It's not necessary to spell it out in blocks of visual data. In this case, as the narrator has lost her sight, it would be deeply suspect to do so. But what New Orleans is, in the end, is a place of the heart and soul more than a physical entity. New Orleans is either your home or it isn't, and you're aware of the answer from the second you arrive. It is undeniable and it is for life: You're a yat at heart or the magic is lost on you.
The magic is lost on me.
That doesn't mean I don't get it, though. I get what draws people to the place. I think Chessman's words vivify the spell of New Orleans as much as they limn the landscape of art. The narrative device of a lost sketchbook filled with New Orleans's grace and beauty by one of the leading artists of the time read to a blind woman relative of that artist by one of the subjects of his art is delightful. It requires no effort to understand...and that's the highest compliment I can offer a writer irrespective of the genre in which she works. Framing devices are too often part of a Conversation With The Reader. I don't appreciate that kind of story. I want you to lift me out of my comfy reading posture and transport me to your story's locale without making blaring announcements like a train's conductor does.
And that is Harriet Chessman's gift.
Here on my lap is something Edgar held once, and many times, something he opened, often,
to record what he saw in our pretty, messy, crowded house. I wonder if Edgar still misses this sketchbook.
I wonder what his days are like now. He must have filled dozens, hundreds, more such books since that winter when he was our guest.
In a passage tesserated from simple words, the complex conceit of the book takes shape. Telly, our blind point of view character, vivifies the world Chessman creates for us to inhabit. Telly is never obtrusive...she isn't the point of her own story, how typically female...she talks to us like she's across the tea table, she chats with us as she would any friend come to wile away an afternoon. It becomes more and more obvious to the reader that Telly inhabits her time with her cousin Edgar as old people inhabit their past. She is the mother of young people, she is the wife of a good man, and she is blind. She is blind in her eyes and she is blind in her heart and she gropes for understanding at every turn, physical or psychical.
Over the course of these 130-ish pages, I felt myself adjusting my reading speed to expand my pleasure in Telly's company. Odile and Honor came to feel like intruders, not one a beloved child and the other a welcome visitor. I was jealous of the attention they commanded from Telly. How silly, I'd tell myself, as annoyance whipped through me at Telly addressing one or the other. As it happened, Edgar, to whom Telly speaks in her memories of the past, elicited no such response from me. I was, instead, a full participant in Telly's relationship to her glamorous Parisian cousin.
I love reading books where I am that fully engrossed, carried out of the 21st century. It's a pleasure to be made that transparent to one's own eyes. I recommend this read to anyone looking for an immersive experience that won't require an entire month to read but will leave food for thought to keep you ruminating for months to come.
August 20, 2019
I love Chessman's writing and artistic sensibilities. This plot is intriguing, exploring 3 weeks of Degas' visit with his extended family in New Orleans. Apparently no sketchbook exists for those 3 weeks, and Chessman has developed a reason that unravels like a mystery. What makes this all the more interesting is that Tell, the narrator, is blind. She needs others to see for her. What she sees and doesn't see is a reflection of what most of us are willing to face every day--reality or our own fictions. 3.5 stars.
March 5, 2018
The French impressionist painter Edgar Degas returns to Harriet Scott Chessman’s fictional world as something almost evanescent. He’s an actual presence, (the painter visiting his cousin, Tell, and her family in New Orleans), but he’s there almost off-stage. Chessman uses him as an ethereal counterpoint to the terrible maladies that blight his cousin’s unlucky life: adultery, plague, business failure, et al. Only long after he returns to France does Tell, who’s blind and the book’s narrator, discover a sketchbook the artist left behind. The sketchbook, as it turns out, has also served as a diary for both Degas and the Tell’s daughter, Josephine. As a young servant reads the diary entries and describes the sketches to her, Tell realizes that Degas is revealing the deepest secrets of his visit, sometimes suspected or even divined, but never directly acknowledged.
Chessman has shown once again that great literary things can come in small packages. The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas clocks in at a mere 137 pages, more novella than novel. Still, it’s plenty. The story is fully realized, and the characters fully formed. There is nothing lost due to its brevity.
Chessman is wonderfully skilled at unveiling the nuance of character. She doesn’t have to use artifice or bring the action to a boil to adroitly plumb the human condition. Unlike so many fictional creations these days, her characters don’t wallow in loud self-importance or muse about life soporiferously. In their resignation and resilience, and their simmering, understated emotions, they’re almost heroic. Being that way lures us into the deep waters of their lives, then rewards us for taking the plunge.
Chessman has shown once again that great literary things can come in small packages. The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas clocks in at a mere 137 pages, more novella than novel. Still, it’s plenty. The story is fully realized, and the characters fully formed. There is nothing lost due to its brevity.
Chessman is wonderfully skilled at unveiling the nuance of character. She doesn’t have to use artifice or bring the action to a boil to adroitly plumb the human condition. Unlike so many fictional creations these days, her characters don’t wallow in loud self-importance or muse about life soporiferously. In their resignation and resilience, and their simmering, understated emotions, they’re almost heroic. Being that way lures us into the deep waters of their lives, then rewards us for taking the plunge.
December 8, 2025
A little gem. Degas in New Orleans. And it ends on Epiphany - so it's a Christmas book.
June 28, 2024
3.5 but rounding up for the cleverness of getting so much in such a short space (this is really a novella at only 137 small pages). The story is lyrical and generally thoughtful, based on an interesting real history - though slightly too invented given its basis on real people. Setting in New Orleans particularly shines.
October 15, 2021
From the book’s preface: “Some of Degas’ most beautiful and haunting paintings came out of the winter of 1872-73, when he stayed with his Creole cousins, Didi, Mouche, and Tell, in New Orleans. The sketchbook found by my character Tell – Edgar Degas’ cousin and sister-in-law – is a fiction. However, art historians have wondered about the absence of a sketchbook devoted to New Orleans. This is the mystery that has inspired my story.”
This book works on a couple of levels. First, the look Estelle (Tell) Musson takes back at the visit her cousin made a decade earlier and the events which followed are touching – her husband running off with a family friend, her eyesight deteriorating to the point of blindness, the death of her sister, and the death of four of her six children. In discovering this lost sketchbook and in sifting through her memories, she tries to better understand what happened to her, and what others knew about what was going on in her house. Chessman does a fantastic job of keeping the complete truth as elusive as memories from the past often are. However, I don’t think she quite told the story in the words a 19th century woman in New Orleans would have used.
It was heading for a more average review score from me, despite learning more about Degas - his mixed heritage, his brother’s marriage to his first cousin, and the retinal disease that he also had, which seriously impaired his art as his life went on. As the truth unfolds, however, the thought that paintings from this little period of his life could be explained by a story, and what Degas saw in this household and then transferred onto canvas, hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s fiction, but believable, and more importantly, reminds us to think about the artwork we see, and what may be behind it. Looking up the paintings which are referenced while one reads is half the fun, and shows how Chessman was quite clever in fusing the true history of this family with Degas’ paintings to produce this lovely little story.
Quotes:
On appreciation:
“I try to remember more of my conversations with Edgar as he sketched or painted me. I remember bits here and there. It was more of a feeling I recall, though, of being looked at very carefully and very slowly, each inch of my face, my body. Of being cherished – maybe that was it.”
On beauty, keeping one’s eyes open to it in life, and love:
“Such beauty – I could not have known there would be such beauty – and may I hold all of this in my heart, and in my inner eye; may I continue to open my eyes; and may her light always shine inside me, so.”
On love, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:
“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken…”
This book works on a couple of levels. First, the look Estelle (Tell) Musson takes back at the visit her cousin made a decade earlier and the events which followed are touching – her husband running off with a family friend, her eyesight deteriorating to the point of blindness, the death of her sister, and the death of four of her six children. In discovering this lost sketchbook and in sifting through her memories, she tries to better understand what happened to her, and what others knew about what was going on in her house. Chessman does a fantastic job of keeping the complete truth as elusive as memories from the past often are. However, I don’t think she quite told the story in the words a 19th century woman in New Orleans would have used.
It was heading for a more average review score from me, despite learning more about Degas - his mixed heritage, his brother’s marriage to his first cousin, and the retinal disease that he also had, which seriously impaired his art as his life went on. As the truth unfolds, however, the thought that paintings from this little period of his life could be explained by a story, and what Degas saw in this household and then transferred onto canvas, hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s fiction, but believable, and more importantly, reminds us to think about the artwork we see, and what may be behind it. Looking up the paintings which are referenced while one reads is half the fun, and shows how Chessman was quite clever in fusing the true history of this family with Degas’ paintings to produce this lovely little story.
Quotes:
On appreciation:
“I try to remember more of my conversations with Edgar as he sketched or painted me. I remember bits here and there. It was more of a feeling I recall, though, of being looked at very carefully and very slowly, each inch of my face, my body. Of being cherished – maybe that was it.”
On beauty, keeping one’s eyes open to it in life, and love:
“Such beauty – I could not have known there would be such beauty – and may I hold all of this in my heart, and in my inner eye; may I continue to open my eyes; and may her light always shine inside me, so.”
On love, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:
“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken…”
November 27, 2017
This short novella provides a fictional backstory for the paintings that Edgar Degas created during his New Orleans visit. However, the paintings themselves are only vaguely described. The reader - like the blind - narrator has no visual experience of the paintings, only the description given by others. The plot is driven by the rediscovery of a lost sketchbook belonging to Degas. It takes place within a day, with recollections spanning over a winter season ten years previous, as the revelations of the sketchbook lead the protagonist to see the truth of her life and relationships as she could not herself. The characters in general are rather like sketches, impressionistic, rendered in brief, leaving me as the reader wanting to know more fully who they are. Though the narrator was not an unsympathetic character, she did come across as unsympathetically self-absorbed, which made it difficult to wholly like her. Nevertheless, the novella is a compelling exploration of perception, the things we see and the things we can only see in hindsight.
June 17, 2017
I am an artist and generally love historical fiction about artists I admire, but this one I'm afraid takes huge liberties inventing incidents Also, if you are going to make up a novel about an artist's liost notebook which references in detail the paintings he did in New Orleans, those paintings should be included or at least well enough referenced by title so they could be located. The book was a tedious effort for me if primary interest is Degas rather than imagined characterizations of his American relatives.
September 18, 2017
The author shares a story based on historical notes and ends up creating something that I wish was nonfiction. After recently moving to New Orleans I found this book a great read. I got to learn about local figures and an artist that in many ways is still a mystery to me. This story got me at the yearning for something more and wondering what could have been. It made me think of what breadcrumbs I may have left behind in my life. This was a good read for anyone who likes historical fiction.
Mr Joe
Mr Joe
May 17, 2017
This small book is a fictionalized account of artist Edgar Degas's visit to relatives living in New Orleans. The narrator who is remembering the visit, is his blind cousin, Tell. Her memories are so vivid and nuanced, that, by comparison, I felt blind to my own surroundings. Harriet Scott Chessman is a masterful writer. This her latest book, tops all her beautiful others.
November 1, 2017
Charming, gentle story of the 5 months that Degas spent in New Orleans with cousins. The narrator is blind and needs a former servant to describe the sketches. But we have access to her memories and musings of that visit. And we’re left with the sort of longing that occurs when we watch the sun dip below the horizon.
January 29, 2025
2.75. I didn’t find this very engaging. Although short the crux or mystery of it dragged on. There is a sense of foreboding which carries the story but ultimately irks me as it is anticlimactic in terms of the story itself being fictional, so it’s all wishful thinking. The depth and nuance of it depends too much on speculation.
May 5, 2017
I always get excited when Harriet Chessman writes a new book, and The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas did not disappoint. Her dreamy storytelling is lyrical, bewitching and uniquely masterful. Highly recommend.
April 17, 2026
Beautiful story-brought to mind happy memories of humid Nola with Anna!
Degas is just the best. His outlook and response to “ugliness”, equating it with life, something real and vital, is something I’m going to ponder.
Also a fantastic narrator with a disability!?! With a daughter Josie lol
Degas is just the best. His outlook and response to “ugliness”, equating it with life, something real and vital, is something I’m going to ponder.
Also a fantastic narrator with a disability!?! With a daughter Josie lol
September 18, 2017
Short and well developed characters. I enjoyed reading about a time when New Orleans was still a classy and family-oriented society.
August 27, 2023
More of a long short story than a novel, this book is a sweet little glimpse into what could be a sweeping family melodrama.
May 4, 2017
Written with Harriet Scott Chessman's usual sensitivity and attention to the intricacies and subtleties of ordinary lives, "The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas" is a moving portrait of a blind woman in New Orleans coming to terms with the consequences of a visit from her cousin, the artist Edgas Degas. Requiring that the blind cousin, Tell - whom Degas did indeed visit in 1872-3 - experience Degas' work, and words, through the eyes of other characters in the story imbues this short novel with rich complexity. For a gentle work, it gains the heft to pack an emotional punch.
September 25, 2017
A quiet glimpse into the time Edgar Degas spent on a family visit to New Orleans resonates like one of his beautiful paintings.
April 12, 2017
Although I had heard good things about this book, I did not find it to be very interesting, actually quite disappointing.
April 17, 2017
Slightly melodramatic, but an interesting exploration of what is seen and what is hidden, what is reality and what truths art depicts.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews