Ivan Vladislavić

Liam

Liam

Administrator
Ivan Vladislavić is a South African writer of Croatian origin. Wikipedia describes his writing style as decidedly postmodern, "intermingling fantasy with references to historic events, enabling them to signify with symbolic meanings both within a South African context and beyond. His is a distinctively individual voice."

Bibliography:

Missing Persons (1989, short stories)

The Folly (1993, novel)

Propaganda by Monuments (1996, short stories)

The Restless Supermarket (2001, novel)

The Exploded View (2004, short stories)

Portrait with Keys (2006, non-fiction)

...​

Seagull Books is publishing his The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories in January of 2012. From the editorial blurb:

In this unusual text, a blend of essay, fiction, and literary genealogy, South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic explores the problems and potentials of the fictions he could not bring himself to write.

Drawing from his notebooks of the past twenty years, Vladislavic records here a range of ideas for stories—unsettled accounts, he calls them, or case studies of failure—and examines where they came from and why they eluded him.

In the process, he reveals some of the principles that matter to him as a writer, and pays tribute to the writers— such as Walser, Perec, Sterne, and DeLillo—who have been important to him as both a reader and an author.

At the heart of the text, like a brightly lit room in a field of debris, stands Vladislavic’s Loss Library itself, the shelves laden with books that have never been written. On the page, Vladislavic tells us, every loss may yet be recovered.

An extraordinary book about both the nature of novels and the process of writing, The Loss Library will appeal to anyone seeking to understand the almost magical and mythical experience of breathing life into a new work of fiction.
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Eric

Former Member
I remember nearly buying his supermarket book in Visby about three years ago. But in Swedish translation. I later borrowed it from the library, but it didn't grab me. Maybe I should try to read it in English instead. Or try his latest. Because I have noticed his name, not least because of its Croatian origin.
 
Liam

Liam

Administrator
I just hope he's not milking the same apartheid cow ad nauseam, like most South African authors including their former golden-boy Coetzee prior to his moving away.
 
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Eric

Former Member
That's why I read sophisticated women writers writing in Afrikaans. They tend not to keep on regurgitating apartheid (pronounced: "apart hate") in the same way as those 900-page greenhorns are regurgitating the Holocaust over in the USA.

I'm still neutral towards Vladislavic, until I've read more.

The person who recommended Coetzee to me was an Afrikaans woman lecturer. But I couldn't warm to that Australian author, despite the recommendation.
 
Liam

Liam

Administrator
Perhaps you couldn't warm up to him because he's a cold, cold, cold writer? :)

He has a PhD in mathematics or computer science (not sure which) and I think it shows. He approaches each of his books as a kind of software program. Especially the last few: Slow Man (aka Slow Novel), The Diary of a Bad Year and (as much as I like certain parts of it) Elizabeth Costello.

He never simply explores the subject of human pain. With Coetzee, it is always, let us see what I can do with the subject of human pain in order to make a political statement.

I'm sorry, but I want to read novels, not manifestos.

Disgrace was the last straw. However, there are people walking around telling you it's the best fucking thing ever written.
 
Liam

Liam

Administrator
I found myself in the thick of things. I shut my eyes experimentally, opened them again. If I was dreaming, the scene should change--but no, everything was exactly as it had been before.

So begins A Labour of Moles, by one of South Africa's most important writers, Ivan Vladislavić: a story which takes the reader into a realm utterly alien and at the same time as familiar as the letters forming the words on the page and the very building-blocks of fiction.

Published in October in a gorgeous edition by Sylph Editions (45 pages):

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Eric

Former Member
The problem with the word "moles" in a title is that word has at least four common or fairly common meanings: a) a furry digging animal; b) a dark spot on your face; c) a breakwater; d) a molecular measure. Though I think that three of these meanings fall away when the word "labour" is added.
 
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Ben Jackson

Well-known member
Influences:

Robert Walser, Sebald, Perec, Sterne, De Lillo

Key Works:


Portrait with Keys (2008)
Restless Supermarket (2001)
Exploded View (2004)
Double Negative (2011)
The Distance (2019)
 
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