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Posts from the ‘Jakuta Alikavazovic’ Category

Jul 29

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Like a Sky Inside

“What we call growing up is a series of betrayals.”

In her new book Like a Sky Inside (Fern Books, 2024), the French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin heritage Jakuta Alikavazovic somehow managed to convince the mighty authorities of Paris’ Louvre Museum to let her stay overnight unattended among its unimaginably valuable collection. “At that time neither the security personnel nor the curator, nor even my editor . . . none of them knew that I am the daughter of a man who, each time we visited [the Louvre], he asked me: And you, how would you go about stealing the Mona Lisa? “

Hoping that the museum will not subject her to the usual security measures, Alikavazovic carried something illegal inside her bag on the night of August 7, 2020, something she never reveals to us. While partly an opportunity to observe and think deeply about art, much of Like a Sky Inside becomes a recapitulation of her relationship with her father, a Serb who fled Yugoslavia to come to the Paris that he had loved from afar. “He did everything in the Louvre. Even brush my teeth, he confided to me once, which struck me as insane and which I’m nevertheless going to do in a few hours.” He taught himself French in the Louvre by reading French novels and books about the artists in the Louvre.

Before the lights go out at midnight, she runs, twirls, slides in her socks, and comes face-to-face with a janitor mopping the floor, who only smiles and shrugs. She eats a nougat bar in clear defiance of the no-food rule. But then the lights go out at ten, instead of midnight, and the museum is plunged into shadows. “The history of art is a ghost story for grown-ups, my father used to say.”

As Jakuta grows up, she sees her father conducting business in the Louvre, without really thinking too much about it. One day her father leaves her on a bench in the museum while he goes to make a quick telephone call. By closing time he still hasn’t returned and a museum guard is speaking to her when her father finally comes running up, out of breath. Looking back on the many times when her father asked her how she might steal the Mona Lisa, she thinks: “it took me almost a quarter of a century to wonder what it really was that drove my father to ask me that exact question. Into what part of his life, his secret life, was he unknowingly—of perhaps knowingly—trying to initiate me.”

Eventually, Jakuta rejects everything about her father, including the Louvre, France, even French. She comes to America, dyes her hair pink, and likes the kind of artists her father doesn’t understand—James Turrell, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria. Fittingly, she uses a bus visit to Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” in Utah to spiral her way back to her father, back to sleeping one night in the Louvre twenty years later, finally aware that she was very much in his mold. “My secret is that I have come here tonight to become my father’s daughter again.”

One day someone hints that her father might have had something vaguely to do with the theft of five valuable paintings from Paris’ Museum of Modern Art on May 20, 2010. As she lies in a sleeping bag beneath the Venus de Milo, wide awake, she wonders if there could be any truth at all to this rumor. In the early morning hours of August 8, Jakuta wanders the museum alone, trying to decide where to leave the mysterious gift she has brought to honor her father. Near Diana the Huntress? Among the Corots? Among the Roman copies of Greek statues?

Why was he incapable, or why did he think me incapable, of visiting the Louvre without ulterior motives, as anyone would, as everyone does? What I think today, and it all but breaks my heart, is that this reverie betrayed a kind of sadness. An unspoken sadness. That this dream, seemingly light, testified to my father’s illegitimacy. The illegitimacy he felt, in spite of everything, finding himself here. As though his presence was improper. As though he was guilty merely by being here—and only he knew it.

One of the things that is so intriguing to me about Alikavazovic’s book is that its goal is to sneak something—well, actually several things—past the reader’s security. A book that is supposed to be about a sleepover at the world’s most famous museum ends up being about topics of much greater import: trying to understand how her Serbian father, who fled an ethnic-cleansing Yugoslavia, fell in love with a France where he never felt legitimate; trying to understand why art is protected behind bulletproof glass and with guards while human life is often tossed aside as worthless or mowed down relentlessly as it was in her father’s city of Sarajevo; debating if art has any value in today’s war-torn world. Like a Sky Inside is a very worthy read.

Translated from the 2021 French original by Daniel Levin Becker.