Written by a native of neighbouring Pretoria, this is a book about Johannesburg to which the author moved while still in his teens; an embattled city, where he lives even now, coping with “everyday abnormality”. Short, lyrical texts tautly bring together snapshots, events, meditations, all in first person: the author’s point of view. These pieces, thought-provoking, poetic at times, and often disturbing, apparently lack narrative cohesion but we soon realise how subtly they coalesce into a chilling portrait of an urban jungle driven by uncertainty, racism, random violence, hustle, theft, murder and the exigencies of hard-core survival. As the author asserts, this is “a frontier city, a place of contested boundaries. Territory must be secured and defended, or it will be lost. Today, the contest is fierce…” One city is all the book’s about, yet much travel does take place within its limits: into memory, history, the arts, changing decades. By no means a grim book, there’s humour here, irony, observation, pathos as well. And perhaps because it’s only one city and its concrete streets (unyieldingly home to Vladislavic), he is able to dig deep, uncovering layers of palimpsest that lurk beneath.
Cyrus Mistry is a playwright and writer whose latest book is Chronicle of a Corpse Beater.