Portrait with Keys
The City of Johannesburg Unlocked
12 May 2009
Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
Description
In the wake of apartheid, the flotsam of the divided past flows over Johannesburg and settles, once the tides recede, around Ivan Vladislavic, who, patrolling his patch, surveys the changed cityscape and tries to convey for us the nature and significance of those changes. He roams over grassy mine-dumps, sifting memories, picking up the odd glittering item here and there, before everything of value gets razed or locked away behind one or other of the city's fortifications. For this is now a city of alarms, locks and security guards, a frontier place whose boundaries are perpetually contested, whose inhabitants are 'a tribe of turnkeys'. Vladislavic, this clerk of mementoes, stands still, watches and writes – and his astonishing city comes within our reach.
A classic from a writer who knows – and loves – his fractured, fractious city from the inside out, bearing comparison with Suketu Mehta's MAXIMUM CITY, Orhan Pamuk's ISTANBUL and Joseph Brodsky's WATERMARK.
Reviews
"Portrait with Keys is a beautiful book, affecting and ingenious, opening new intellectual vistas onto art and architecture, poetry and urbanism." — Ian Volner, Bookforum
"Like the city it studies, Portrait with Keys is complex, with vast rewards for the patient reader." — Tracey D. Samuelson, Christian Science Monitor
"A wonderful book about Johannesburg....This is a love letter to Johannesburg and a truly marvelous piece of work. I read it and was deeply moved." — Justin Cartwright, Literary Review
"A rare, brilliant writer. His work eschews all cant. Its sheer verve, the way it burrows beneath ossified forms of writing, its discipline and the distance it places between itself and the jaded preoccupations of local fiction, distinguish it." — Sunday Times [London]
"Freshly engaging, with its wry take on security and a homeless underclass that stashes its winter wardrobe in manholes beneath Africa’s richest city." — Maya Jaggi, The Guardian
"A passionate account by a man who loves his city, shocking because it so embraces the things most people try to avoid thinking about." — The Independent [UK]
"Reminds me sometimes of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul and sometimes of James Joyce’s Dubliners, but it is altogether one of a kind. . . . He leaves his readers consoled by the feeling that art and goodness alike can be impervious to squalor." — Jan Morris
