Jakuta Alikavazovic

A charming book that in short form explores several issues: the immigrant experience, the place of art in museums, the "gaze", the writing experience, a father-daughter relationship, and the writing process.

as a young girl, the narrator, became aware of her father's allure of Paris and the Louvre which he considered a city within the city of light. He as a 20 year old, fleeing the draft in Yugoslavia, though poor he made sure he had an elegant overcoat, "if you look poor too, you're show more screwed...a good real estate investment, my father thought, was a handsome coat. A coat to live in, to live intensely." Reading this passage, I was easily reminded of Gogol's mid-level clerk who drove himself into poverty and madness in the great short story, The Overcoat.

The narrator's father was specifically enamored with the Mona Lisa that hung there; he would play a game with her in which he would ask, "and you, how would you go about stealing the Mona Lisa?"

Now, as a writer, she talks herself into an assignment in which the museum allows her to spend the night there walking the galleries and bedding down for the night. This unusual setting frames much of the story that plays out. Inevitably she explores her own history and the role art plays in all our lives. She elicits specific examples like musing about Walter de Maria's, Spiral Journey, a gigantic art earthwork: "you can stand on it but you can't take it in all at once. In this way it's like life, like your life, elusive at the moment it's experienced, already past once it allows itself to be captured."

As she ponders what was first experienced as his innocent question about stealing the Mona Lisa she starts to question whether he might have been involved in another museum heist in which a band of Slavic thieves stole some art pieces from another museum. She also ponders that "once you know it [a work of art] by heart...the work now exists nowhere, really, but n your head. Nowhere but in your heart. You've pulled off the perfect heist."

Thinking of her family's own history escaping the war in Yugoslavia: "what do we talk about when we talk about art? Conservation. Permanence. A vow of eternity...eternally cared for, eternally cherished, once it is recognized as such." Yet in the face of war when people's lives are finite by death and destruction the worshipping of art "strikes me as obscene."

This is a book that certainly resonated in me the awe I often experience when in a museum or in the Rose Reading Room at the 42nd Street New York Public Library. The austere majesty of being in the presence of the creative arts is often inspiring allowing oneself to soar in one's own mind. As in Jakuta Alikavazovic's gem, Like A Sky Inside, imagining spending a quiet night in solitude there feels almost holy. show less

This book was written as part of a multi-author project which invited authors to spend the night in a museum of their choice and then asked them to write a text based on that experience. It was started in 2018, and this book is the result of the author spending the night in the Louvre in Paris.

This is a small book – almost a novella. In March of 2020, only days before Covid took over, the author left her 3-month-old son and husband to spend the night in the Louvre. While there, she begins show more to reminisce about the many times she came to the Louvre with her father. She considers how he came to Paris from Hungary and how he tried to reinvent himself to be Parisian. And she thinks about his parting question each time they left the museum: “How would you go about stealing the Mona Lisa?”.

This book was short-listed for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for US/Canada for 2025 and was brought to my attention by Sarah from the Eyes on Indie YouTube channel. show less

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Alikavazovic-Histoires-contre-nature/834688

> Voici un livre qui sort radicalement de l'ordinaire, qui bouscule tout sur son passage, à adorer ou à détester. C'est assez rare pour être souligné.
—Danieljean (Babelio)