Portrait with Keys

"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. Ivan is perhaps suggesting that people might want to knock down their walls, look on to the streets and try to take the first step towards mutual trust. You can do that by knocking down your walls, which we don’t."

"Another unpronounceable name. His dad may have been from Croatia or something. It’s always suspicious when people immigrate to South Africa. But 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. The tone is very different. Dubliners is elegiac, Portrait with Keys is eccentric. But both are really good books. As a writer I have misgivings about all writing, but I don’t have that many misgivings about this book. I don’t know if it is a very good guide to those problems. Have you ever played the video game Doom ? I always thought of Johannesburg as like the world in Doom . The moment you are out in a passageway, someone is trying to kill you; the moment you go through a door, there are shots. Ivan does a great job of exploring how human life can continue in those circumstances. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter My next novel is about what we call taxis. The central vehicles of South African transport are these little vans that pick people up. The owners get together, divide up territory, and wage war on rival companies. They constantly have shootouts. It’s incredibly violent and fascinating. There’s quite a lot of freedom to write in the absence of readers and in the absence of money. With the exception of the author of Spud , no South African writer has ever become rich, except by marrying rich. There is quite a lot of freedom when you have no attention, no readership and no royalties."