Publish Date |
March 26, 2024 |
Category |
Art |
Price |
$25.95 |
In March 2020, a young woman spends the night in the Louvre. At home: her nine-month-old son. In her overnight bag: a notebook, a toiletry kit, a duvet, a cube of nougat, and something that shouldn't be there. In her head: memories of the Venus de Milo, of land art and the American road, of romance and travel and immigration and war —and of her father, who after each of their many visits to the Louvre would ask just how she'd go about stealing the Mona Lisa. An insightful and heartfelt meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of art, on parenthood and the betrayals of growing up, on foreignness and belonging, and on the secret conversations between our souls and the places that linger in our dreams.
Let's go back even further, my father said. It's not even certain that the original purpose of what we call art was to be seen.
In a way, we could go so far as to say that art, what we call art, is made less to be seen than to be stolen.
Winner of the Prix Medicis Essai 2021
ISBN: 9781735297361
Format: Paperback
Pages: 160
Publisher: Fern Books
Published: March 26, 2024
“Jakuta Alikavazovic’s sentences and charged silences bring individual and collective histories into unpredictable, illuminating relation. She writes with lyric precision while making the limits of language felt. We need all of her books in English.” — Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School and Leaving the Atocha Station
“With this book, Jakuta confirms her immense and singular talent. She leads us in superb style through the Louvre, on the trail of her childhood. She examines identity, the place of memory, and that territory of the night that she has brilliantly made her own. A deeply moving book!” — Leïla Slimani, author of The Perfect Nanny and Watch Us Dance
“Jakuta Alikavazovic charges her prose with tension and truth, offering the companionship of her generous, seeking mind while also daring to turn the lights off — to leave us for brief moments alone in the dark — for the purpose of drawing closer to the absences structuring this extraordinary portrait of the writer as a daughter, as a mother, as a second-generation emigrant, as a patient sifter of the most formative stories, her powers of transgression and self-preservation stashed in a shoulder bag. Like a Sky Inside is deeply compelling, secret, and surprising. I loved it.” — Kate Briggs, author of The Long Form and This Little Art
“Jakuta Alikavazovic’s sentences, beautifully translated by Daniel Levin Becker, are quicksilver prodigies, many-headed and many-tailed; one experiences them as disturbances and occasions, as corporeal shocks. She is one of the great writers of our time.” — Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
“Like a Sky Inside is about a night spent at the Louvre, but really it is about art and enchantment, exile and longing. Above all, it is a devastatingly tender portrait of Alikavazovic’s relationship with her father, written with unsurpassed brio, intelligence, and empathy.” — Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies and A Separation
“A perfect sculpture of pure thought, the kind of artwork that makes you want to steal it, a generous and joyful book that stitches memory and philosophy and narrative together so elegantly I was completely enthralled.” — Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X and Pew
“Like a Sky Inside is that rare, crystalline short book that manages to be about a lot of different things — art, immigration and xenophobia, parenthood, daughterhood, self-invention — while seeming only to be about one (highly singular) evening in the writer's life. It is lucid, meditative, pointed, and so beautifully written that reading it provides precious moments of a kind of generative peace. A gift of a book.” — Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility and The Golden State