Ivan Vladislavić > Quotes

“At the end of the month, the doors will close on our little club for the last time. The end of an error.”
― Ivan Vladislavic, The Restless Supermarket

“Write it down. Not just to remember it, but to forget it in the right way. My notebook are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules. More than once I have been surprised to discover that an idea I thought was new and original, something I set down in a notebook yesterday, is already contained in another note from years before. Sometimes the second version repeats the first, almost word for word, across the space of a decade. The earlier version, once brought with clarity to the surface, has been covered over again by layers of yellowing paper.”
― Ivan Vladislavić

“getting lost is not always a bad thing”
― Ivan Vladislavic

“There are no big stories left, just paths through the clutter and the inevitable soft landing.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories

“They would beat him and hammer him
and drill him. He bobbed, and ducked, and refused to fall. They struck out, as if they were driving nails into him, and with every blow he felt more like himself”
― Ivan Vladislavić, The Exploded View

“The new restraint. Where should one draw the line?
The world was so loud, and no one took seriously a thing that didn’t attract attention to itself. There was no room for subtlety. Things were either visible or not, their qualities were either shouting from the surface or silent. This silence, the lull behind the noisy surface of objects, was difficult and dangerous. You never knew what it held, if anything. How were you to judge whether the voice you heard was a deeper meaning, whispering its secrets, or merely the distorted echo of your own babble?”
― Ivan Vladislavić, The Exploded View

“Even the leading lights of apartheid, the men who had made and enforced the laws, were starting to come clean, not just recanting but voicing the doubts they claimed to have been harbouring all along. If the social engineers had never really believed, why should the fitters and turners keep the faith? Soon there would be no believers left.
People were not lying either: they were merely inventing. perhaps the freight of the past had to be lightened if the flimsy walls of the new South Africa were not to buckle. How much past can the present bear? there was already talk of a Truth Commission. But people are constitutionally unmade for the truth. Good, reliable fictions, that's what the doctor ordered.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative

“For years, we knew the double-storey at the bottom of Albermarle Street as the Gandhi House. In the decade before the Great War, we'd been told, Gandhi lived here with his family. Now the house has lost its claim on history 9but not its plaque from the National Monuments Council). An enterprising researcher, with nothing to gain by his unmasking except the truth, has shown that Gandhi did not live here after all, but up the road at No. 11. One of Gandhi's descendants, who visited the house as a child, has provided confirmation. The people at No. 11 should have that plaque moved to their wall.
Both the Gandhi Houses, the true and the false, are double-storeys set on a promontory between two thoroughfares, but the attitudes of the streets could not differ more. Hillier and Albermarle Streets approach the impostor rather Kindly, cupping it in leafy palms, whereas Albermarle and Johannes grip the genuine article like an egg in a nutcracker.
No. 11 has a handsome corrugated-iron roof and a wide, shady balcony. I recall an orante wrought-iron finial, the ECG of a Victorian heartbeat, dancing along the roof ridge, but it must have been removed by the renovators. I cannot remember ever seeing a person on the balcony, perfectly suited though it is to reading the paper or chatting over sundowners, but for a few years there were shop-window mannequins leaning on the parapet. Perhaps they were scarecrows for thieves? At night, with the lighted windows behind them, they always deceived the eye. Something in the atmosphere, a bit of lace around the neck, a reddish tinge of the light from the doorway, made them look like whores.
Apparently, the Mahatma used to take his rest on the balcony on summer nights. It is easy to picture him there with sleep in his eyes, buffing his little round glasses on the hem of a bed sheet.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked

“The term "tomason" was coined by Genpei Akasegawa to describe a purposeless object found on a city street/ He has tracked and tagged hundreds of them in Japan and other parts of the world. A tomason is a thing that has become detached from its original purpose. Sometimes this detachment may be so complete that the object is turned into an enigmatic puzzle; alternatively, the original purpose of the object may be quite apparent and its current uselessness touching or amusing. It may be a remnant of a larger fixture that has been taken away, or it may be a thing complete in itself, whose purpose has been forgotten. Perhaps the people who put it there, who used it and needed it, have moved away or died. Perhaps the trade it was meant to serve is no longer practiced. The natural habitat of the tomason is the city street. Thisis not to say that the tomasons cannot be found in the countryside, but they are so scare there that hunting for them would be tedious. Tomasons thrive in the man-made world, in spaces that are constantly being remade and redesigned for other purposes, where the function of a thing that was useful and necessary may be swept away in a tide of change or washed off like a label. They are creatures of the boundary, they gravitate to walls and fences, to entrances and exits. You will find them attached to facades or jutting out of pavements.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked

“This is our climate. We have grown up in this air, this light, and we grasp it on our skin, where it grasps us. We know this earth, this grass, this polished red stone with the soles of our feet. 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.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked

“At the side of the house, where a bougainvillea growing on to the roof made a sort of arbor, a dozen skulls were fixed to the wall. Animal skulls, pale as driftwood, bleached to sea-shades against the powder-blue plaster. The centerpiece was obviously the skull of a horse. There were others whose shapes suggested the flesh in which they had once been embedded: a dog, a rabbit, and more I could only guess at - rat, lamb, lizard, mole. The way they were arranged, with the horse in the middle and the lesser creatures above and below, each in its proper station, the beaked birds under the rafters, the head of the dog at a height that invited you to scratch its ear although its jaw was dropped to snap at your ankle, made them less like trophies than ghosts, passing through the wall that instant, hungry for meat and grass, for air and company, breaking back into the realm of the living. One of the skulls had small, pointed horns, darkly whorled, as shiny as enamel. Suspended in the eye socket of the horse was a pocket watch with its hands hanging down, defeated.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative

“Yet all the fun we had riding bicycles and kicking soccer balls counted for nothing because they were in here working, wearing paper hats and striped aprons as if they were in an Archie comic. They were already kids and we were still children.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked