Review: Ivan Vladislavic's Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked

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Review: Ivan Vladislavic's Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked

POSTED: Wednesday, August 5, 2009, 7:36 PM

Norton, 208 pp., $14.95, June 1

Ivan Vladislavic's text is an earnest dialogue, a conversation with the past laden with dread as the aftermath of Apartheid looms heavily. Johannesburg feels post-apocalyptic at times in the studied vein of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, as the author subtly builds tension by immersing us in a city being abandoned while it crumbles apart; the text of Portrait with Keys, infused with a wellspring of hope, starts with a metaphor on the value of giving directions. Vladislavic takes us around Jo-Burg detailing the city through a Tim O'Brien-like cataloguing of all he sees; we join him in his peregrinations, and his notice drifts over palisade walls fortified with razor wire and sharpened steel spikes just as calmly as it does over second-story additions or car port expansions. He recoils not merely against the simple act of 'white flight' but also against those who remain and, due to fear, abandon the human connectedness he sees as essential. The landscape is altered as his fellow residents reinforce a prison state while growing more indifferent and enraged toward 'the black criminal element.'

The balm here is that Vladislavic integrates the storied history of the city fully into that of his own past, declaring at one point that 'the city ' is no more than a mnemonic,' a recourse to memory which exists in vivid multiform before his eyes. He's troubled not just by the burgeoning divide in society, but also by the erasure of the past; demolished houses, pilfered statuary and white-washed native murals have eerie power simply through negation, and it is the author's hope that something of himself lives on in the city, that the city 'listens' to him and holds a recording of his astute passage through its many streets just as his keen powers of observation are at the city's disposal. His sensitivity and vulnerability reach their height at the quiet interchange of a tortuous moment where polar opposites of the city, the privileged white writer and a bleeding would-be burglar, take part in a moment of shared terror, the effects of which temper any initially wrathful inclination as the burglar slowly escapes.

The book is divided by a blank space wherein the author abandons the country after nearly doing the same with his possessions, the many things that grow to become as burdensome as memory as the story progresses. But he returns home since he's as inseparable from the city as he is from his hoarded recollections; '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.' And it is in this sentiment that the novel's hopeful spirit, nearly battered by the pervasive misery, is enlivened, as the author, gifted by his sensitive awareness, re-examines the intermingling of two destinies. His lament for the past ' for both personal and societal reasons ' is countered by a courageous call to the future that all suffering cities require. As Johannesburg lives through his luminous writing, this hopeful call for change will carry this city's hero on, as well. A rightful honor, since Vladislavic, inspired by the indelible stamp of culture and humanity of his native city, has gifted us not only with a vision, but with a great work of art.

John Shearer

Posted 2009-08-06 10:32:09

I heard from a good friend, a native Tanzanian, that this book was epic.  Along with the weekly City Paper, this is something that must be had.

Brion Shreffler

Posted 2009-08-06 18:55:14

Yes, it's amazing. It begins with the notion of a walking tour and expands into an exploration of history,memory, and social connectivity, all of which the author puts before our eyes at the same time, thereby presenting a Johannesburg that is constantly shifting and evolving while bearing the weight of the past.

Posted by Brion Shreffler" @ 7:36 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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