Ivan Vladislavic

Ivan Vladislavic (born 17 September 1957) is a South African novelist, essayist and editor. Vladislavić's style has been described as postmodern, innovative, humorous and unpredictable. He has won numerous awards including Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. He lives in Johannesburg where he is a Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand. Quotes At the end of the month, the doors will close on our little club for the last time. The end of an error. Write it down. Not just to remember it, but to forget it in the right way. My notebook are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules. More than once I have been surprised to discover that an idea I thought was new and original, something I set down in a notebook yesterday, is already contained in another note from years before. Sometimes the second version repeats the first, almost word for word, across the space of a decade. The earlier version, once brought with clarity to the surface, has been covered over again by layers of yellowing paper. There are no big stories left, just paths through the clutter and the inevitable soft landing. They would beat him and hammer him and drill him. He bobbed, and ducked, and refused to fall. They struck out, as if they were driving nails into him, and with every blow he felt more like himself Even the leading lights of apartheid, the men who had made and enforced the laws, were starting to come clean, not just recanting but voicing the doubts they claimed to have been harbouring all along. If the social engineers had never really believed, why should the fitters and turners keep the faith? Soon there would be no believers left. People were not lying either: they were merely inventing. perhaps the freight of the past had to be lightened if the flimsy walls of the new South Africa were not to buckle. How much past can the present bear? there was already talk of a Truth Commission. But people are constitutionally unmade for the truth. Good, reliable fictions, that's what the doctor ordered. For years, we knew the double-storey at the bottom of Albermarle Street as the Gandhi House. In the decade before the Great War, we'd been told, Gandhi lived here with his family. Now the house has lost its claim on history 9but not its plaque from the National Monuments Council). An enterprising researcher, with nothing to gain by his unmasking except the truth, has shown that Gandhi did not live here after all, but up the road at No. 11. One of Gandhi's descendants, who visited the house as a child, has provided confirmation. The people at No. 11 should have that plaque moved to their wall. Both the Gandhi Houses, the true and the false, are double-storeys set on a promontory between two thoroughfares, but the attitudes of the streets could not differ more. Hillier and Albermarle Streets approach the impostor rather Kindly, cupping it in leafy palms, whereas Albermarle and Johannes grip the genuine article like an egg in a nutcracker. No. 11 has a handsome corrugated-iron roof and a wide, shady balcony. I recall an orante wrought-iron finial, the ECG of a Victorian heartbeat, dancing along the roof ridge, but it must have been removed by the renovators. I cannot remember ever seeing a person on the balcony, perfectly suited though it is to reading the paper or chatting over sundowners, but for a few years there were shop-window mannequins leaning on the parapet. Perhaps they were scarecrows for thieves? At night, with the lighted windows behind them, they always deceived the eye. Something in the atmosphere, a bit of lace around the neck, a reddish tinge of the light from the doorway, made them look like whores. Apparently, the Mahatma used to take his rest on the balcony on summer nights. It is easy to picture him there with sleep in his eyes, buffing his little round glasses on the hem of a bed sheet. This is our climate. We have grown up in this air, this light, and we grasp it on our skin, where it grasps us. We know this earth, this grass, this polished red stone with the soles of our feet. We will never be ourselves anywhere else. Happier, perhaps, healthier, less burdened, more secure. But we will never be closer to who we are than this. At the side of the house, where a bougainvillea growing on to the roof made a sort of arbor, a dozen skulls were fixed to the wall. Animal skulls, pale as driftwood, bleached to sea-shades against the powder-blue plaster. The centerpiece was obviously the skull of a horse. There were others whose shapes suggested the flesh in which they had once been embedded: a dog, a rabbit, and more I could only guess at - rat, lamb, lizard, mole. The way they were arranged, with the horse in the middle and the lesser creatures above and below, each in its proper station, the beaked birds under the rafters, the head of the dog at a height that invited you to scratch its ear although its jaw was dropped to snap at your ankle, made them less like trophies than ghosts, passing through the wall that instant, hungry for meat and grass, for air and company, breaking back into the realm of the living. One of the skulls had small, pointed horns, darkly whorled, as shiny as enamel. Suspended in the eye socket of the horse was a pocket watch with its hands hanging down, defeated. My writing plans weren’t affected much, but the lockdown derailed a couple of launches. Earlier in the year, Deep South published My Mother’s Laughter, the selected poems of Chris van Wyk, which I coedited with Robert Berold, and the bookshop launches had to be cancelled. Chris has a large and lively readership and we were looking forward to bringing people together. More recently, I’ve been promoting the international edition of my novel The Distance (Archipelago) online rather than through a book tour. I do miss the travel. It’s an opportunity to visit friends and see what’s around the next corner. Then again, I’ve been privileged to travel freely in the past, and now is a good time to think about the cost of our privileges. In an interview When I had just published my first book, I was interviewed for a magazine. The journalist sat down opposite me and took a copy of my book from his bag. ‘I haven’t read this yet,’ he said. ‘I wanted to look at it last night, but something came up.’ He glanced at the blurb. ‘Says here the stories are about power relationships. Where do you stand on the whole art and politics thing?’ It could only get better from there. The art world seems to attract more than its share of charlatans and fools, but perhaps they’re just more visible than in the literary world or the music world or anywhere else. I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s satires on pretension in the film world or Robyn Orlin’s parodies of dance critics and adjudicators. In any event, the art world seems to ‘stand in’ for the literary world in The Exploded View or Double Negative. External links