Recommendations from our site
“Ivan is the most interesting writer on modern urban South Africa. Portrait with Keys is a fictionalised set of little stories. I thought it was a memoir at first but in the book he has conversations with a nonexistent brother. So I decided to classify it as a novel. It’s called Portrait with Keys because everywhere in Johannesburg is locked up, often not just with one door, but with multiple doors. When you stay overnight in a house, they lock all the exterior doors and set the alarm, then go upstairs and lock interior doors just in case somebody breaks in downstairs. So those are the keys.” Read more...
The Best South African Fiction
Imraan Coovadia, Novelist
“I think that Ivan Vladislavic is probably our most unheralded writer. It is my personal belief that since J M Coetzee left for Australia, Ivan is the best craftsman living and working in South Africa today. He is an astoundingly accomplished master of the English sentence. This book is his first work of nonfiction. The book is a series of 138 fragments, each dealing with a specific symbol of Johannesburg, like our keys and our walls. The key is a very symbolic Johannesburg object because we are determined to lock up our stuff. We all walk about with a lot of keys, and Ivan homes in on that. But for me the most important thing that he focuses on is the walls. Through the 138 fragments, I think there are 19 or 20 that look at the subject. He explains to people how the Johannesburg psyche is totally embodied in the height of the walls. And he does it in a very subtle, suggestive and ultimately powerful way. He will talk about barbed wire on top of the wall above the metal spikes. He will talk about the electric fencing and how walls seem to get higher as the city becomes more inward looking. There is no street culture in the affluent parts of South Africa, there is no eye contact.” Read more...
The best books on Post-Apartheid Identity
Kevin Bloom, Journalist
