Like a Sky Inside

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

Author: Jakuta Alikavazovic
Publisher: Fern Books
Published: 03/26/2024
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 6.90h x 4.50w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781735297361

About the Author
Jakuta Alikavazovic is a French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. She has received the Prix Goncourt for a first novel and the Prix Me?dicis for non-fiction, among other European awards and nominations. She is a columnist for the newspaper Libe?ration and the translator into French of authors including David Foster Wallace and Toni Morrison. Daniel Levin Becker is the author of Many Subtle Channels and What's Good and the translator of, most recently, Éric Chevillard's Museum Visits and Laurent Mauvignier's The Birthday Party, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize.