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  • An Interview with Ivan Vladislavić
  • Jane Poyner (bio) and Josh Jewell (bio)

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Photo courtesy of Philip Schedler

Ivan Vladislavić’s literary output has proven hard to pin down. The Exploded View (2004), for instance, described on Vladislavić’s author website as a “quartet of four interlinked fictions,” was excluded from consideration for a Sunday Times Literary Award because it was judged not to conform to the conventions of the novel. Commentators have similarly struggled to categorize Portrait with Keys (2006): Is it a work of fiction, a fictionalized memoir, or a piece of travel writing? Portrait’s narrator is one Vlad―a Pretoria-born writer living in Johannesburg; his brother Branko, according to real-life Vladislavić, is a composite figure and repository of the less appealing aspects of the novelistic central hero who will later make an appearance as Joe’s brother in Vladislavić’s most recent offering, The Distance (2019)―in Portrait Branko is positively racist. Gerald Gaylard, in the introduction to his edited volume Marginal Spaces: Reading Ivan Vladislavić (2011), categorizes Portrait as “creative non-fiction in episodic cameo format” (4); Sarah Nuttall, in the same volume, as “at once memoir, vignette, travelogue and series of anecdotes” (“Invisible City” 329). The Warwick Research Collective (WReC) describe it as “narrative fragments that are grouped along various ‘routes’ of . . . varying lengths” (Combined and Uneven Development 163); and James Graham, an “archive of everyday life” combining “reportage and reflection” (“Ivan Vladislavić and the Possible City” 334). Yet these fragments or “routes” are loosely hung on a before-and-after structure, with Point A and Point B centering on Vlad’s departure from and return to Johannesburg (Poyner, “Art and Visual Culture in Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys” 48). [End Page 141]

Vladislavić’s creative élan reflects the tastes and interests of a writer fascinated by the materiality of text and gestures toward his first career as a translator and editor, of which Vladislavić speaks in the interview that follows. He worked for many years as an editor, initially (for about four to five years) for leftist Johannesburg-based publisher Ravan Press, which he joined in 1984 as a fiction and social studies editor (without prior experience), working with writers like Tim Couzens; and later as a freelancer, editing for Achmat Dangor, Antjie Krog, Jonny Steinberg, and many others. Joining other illustrious figures on South Africa’s cultural scene, he worked briefly as an assistant editor (from 1988–1990) for the iconic literary magazine Staffrider (meaning “a mobile, disreputable bearer of tidings,” according to Mothobi Mutloatse, one of Staffrider’s founding editors [Mike Kirkwood, “Staffrider: An Informal Discussion” 23]), which promoted Black writing and Black concerns amid a racially hostile and dangerous environment. Interviewing Vladislavić in the Johannes burg Review of Books in 2019, Jennifer Malec suggests that The Distance “archives” South African idioms and colloquialisms in the way that Vladislavić has suggested Marlene van Niekerk’s and In-grid Winterbach’s novels do (“The Fallible Memory”). Similarly, the editor’s eye is evident in the casting of curmudgeonly and overtly racist protagonist Aubrey Tearle in The Restless Supermarket (2001), providing a conduit for Vladislavić self-consciously and playfully to express his love of language. Tearle is a proofreader by trade and originator of the “Proofreader’s Derby”: the centerpiece of the novel which, as critic Katie Reid notes, is “compiled from a lifetime’s collection of textual errors” (“News: A. Gofer Wins the Inaugural International Proofreader’s Derby”). Vladislavić would subsequently sit as the judge of a real-life―if staged―“Derby” in 2014, held at Sussex University in the UK and chaired by Reid, marking the publication of The Restless Supermarket in the UK by publisher And Other Stories. In The Distance, central protagonist Joe painstakingly elaborates on the handling of the newspaper cuttings and photographs that, as a child, he gathered together religiously yet in a roughshod and amateurish way into a set of now disintegrating scrapbooks.

A major theme in much of Vladislavić’s fiction is the relationship between language and the built environment. The vague unease his writing provokes comes partially from the pressure exerted on it [End...

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