Vladislavic: Take two

Ivan Vladislavic has won the University of Johannesburg Prize for the second time. Double Negative (Umuzi, 2010) is Vladislavic’s fictional accompaniment to David Goldblatt’s striking photographs of Johannesburg, aptly titled TJ — the city’s old vehicle registration designation. The two volumes first appeared in a box set released in association with Italian publisher Contrasto Due; Double Negative is now available separately.

Double Negative is a three-part novel with a first-person narrator and Vladislavic is once again on familiar ground, seeing Johannesburg through the eyes of dropout student and aspirant photographer Neville Lister.

Like his 2007 UJ Prize-winner, Portrait with Keys: Joburg and What-What (Umuzi, 2006), Double Negative constantly wrong-foots the reader. In a memorable scene from the first part of the novel, visiting British photographer Saul Auerbach and the young Neville, tagging along in what would nowadays be called a stint of “work experience”, sit on a koppie overlooking Bez Valley and from the maze below randomly pick out a house each, which they will then visit and whose inhabitants they will photograph. This is something David Goldblatt did (which Vladislavic recalled reading about), but the event is recast with Auerbach in the main role and Neville as a witness. The effect of this cluster of devices in the book is to make the real unfamiliar and to invest the fantastical with the grit and texture of the real.

The three parts of the novel offer Vladislavic a set of historically ranged prisms through which to view his protagonist’s oblique and unheroic engagement with South African history. The first part, “Available Light”, is set in the late 1970s and early 1980s when foreign visitors would still book into hotels overlooking Joubert Park and when a young white man could walk through Hillbrow from end to end before sitting down for a beer at the Chelsea Hotel or visiting the nearby Exclusive Books. South Africa’s multiform history is framed by the narrator’s narrow, insignificant life.

The larger currents of history brush against the threads of this life, shaping them inexorably, while they in turn make their own minuscule reciprocal contribution to history itself.

Vladislavic’s gift is to make the everyday remarkable and to render the complex accessible. Take this mini-portrait of youthful experience: “Young people learn things intensely. They’re impressionable, we say. The proper image is not a tabula rasa, we are not written upon or etched or branded, but moulded from a substance already dense with thought and feeling. Our teachers reach into us, skilfully or clumsily, it’s the luck of the draw, and shape this substance, they make ridges there, hollows and curves, and perception runs over them, bending to the contours, breaking against the sharp edges repeatedly, until they are as familiar as the roof of your mouth to your tongue.”

In “Dead Letters”, set in the mid-1990s, we see a version of the truculent and contrary Aubrey Tearle (in Vladislavic’s novel Restless Supermarket): “The end of apartheid put my nose out of joint, I must confess. Suddenly the South Africans were talking to one another. They wouldn’t shut up — After a decade of wilfully excluding myself, I felt left out of the club.”

Yielding to an impulse to visit the house he had picked out in Auerbach’s company but had not then had the courage to enter, Neville rings the bell and introduces himself as a historian who is researching the life of a boxer who once lived there. This spontaneous lie soon becomes the proverbial albatross, but not before Mrs Pinheiro, the occupant of the house, weaves a few of her own fabrications. But the centrepiece of this part of the novel is the collection of dead letters she has — undeliverable letters that were dumped in the postal depot where her former tenant (and lover, it turns out) worked.

This is fertile Vladislavic ground: the odd, the piquant, the bizarre, the all-too-believable surreal. Mrs Pinheiro (not really her name) opens one of these long-dead letters “and a prison cell folded out of the silence, a small bare room with walls of the same pale green as the envelope. A man lay on his side in the far corner with his back turned to us. She folded him into an upright position against the wall and pressed a fingertip to his brow. He was shivering. With a sweep of her hand, she smoothed his damp, bloodied body out against the table and raised him to his feet.”

With such hopeless acts of restitution this obscure redeeming angel of Bez Valley attempts to right distant and fading wrongs.

Set in the near-present, “Small Talk” is the novel’s third section and Neville is now the subject of journalistic interest. But this is the multimedia moment and the interviewer inevitably asks Neville to restage their meeting (reopen his door and regreet her) for her digicam — all, of course, in the interests of spontaneous realism. “Shit,” Neville muses disconsolately, “five minutes and I’m already being asked to play myself.”

Double Negative/i> tells a compelling enough story, but carries in its narrative fabric oddments and fascinations that rival the main storyline for the reader’s attention. More deft, effortless and funny than my sketches here perhaps suggest, the novel shows one of South Africa’s foremost writers in full flow.