The Exploded View

Thank you Net Galley. A well written, book of stories, linked by the characters' responses and attempts to understand and deal with the end of apartheid. Interesting as much for the stories as for the insights into South African society.

dang i keep reading brilliant books.

this one is by a white south african writer i didn't know. this book is being reissued and i got it thanks to netgalley and archipelago books.

south africans do race quite spectacularly. in my limited experience of their literature i notice two elements that are not present, yet, in our literary discourse on race. the first, crucially, is an analysis of whitness. when american authors want to talk about race they talk about black or brown folks. south african authors have learned quite early that whiteness is a race too and can/must be analysed in itself. this gives white authors great scope for talking about race without stepping into other people's conversations. the second is that there is less tip-toeing around, and more put-your-arms-deep-down-in-the-wound examination. while we, in the US, are still doing slavery 101, as the success of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad proves, south africans have been talking about what it means to be a racially polarized country for decades.

that i should write this on the day in which our president disclosed to the world that he has no idea who Frederick Douglass is, is, well, poignant and not a little dispiriting.

the first story is about a white man, mid-thirties, employed by the government to work with a focus group to finalize the census form. since there are so many controversial things about collecting census data in SA, this man visits members of his group at their homes (not close to each other) and works with them on various drafts. these people are getting paid for what they do. one of them is a woman who lives in a gated community called venice and sort of faux italian. there are some themes here that will resurface later: patterns of traffic; nigerian presence in SA; statistics; the proximity of wealthy and destitute communities. the story is beautiful and masterfully crafted.

the second is about a sanitation engineer who visits a township (except that's not how they are called any more) that's being built for a black community. the housing is clearly low-cost, and it's pure shite. in the course of the story the protagonist is made to feel excluded by a group of black politicians and administrators who speak in an african language (don't remember which one), cutting him off entirely even though he is part of the group. again, there is attention to place: crappy living quarters, good living quarters, what people deserve, why people complain, the general ideas that the poor should be happy with what they've got, the general idea that the non-poor are entitled to more than what they get.

the third story is about a black artist and the art he does. there is a closing party after a successful exhibition and friends from the art world come. lots of lovely reflections on the creative process, on art, on art and politics, on african art, on serendipitous art, on what is asked of one just because one is black.

the last story, which gives the collection its title, has some lovely bits about america, the dream of america, the mythologizing of places and the impossibility of mythologizing some other places (venice can be mythologized, america can be mythologized, johannesburg, not so much).

all stories are inevitably also about masculinity -- men succeeding and men not entirely succeeding at what they want, what they aspire to, who they want to be. it's a compassionate collection, the stories are brilliant, and the writing is beautiful. i gobbled it up.

Ivan Vladislavic is largely unknown outside his native South Africa, but if The Exploded View is representative of his work, it’s amazing that he isn’t an international name read as widely as Raymond Carver or Alice Munro.
Originally published in 2004, The Exploded View is four interlinked short stories, or, as Vladislavic prefers to describe it, a novel in four parts, and has a strong focus on art and architecture. Each section deals with one of four ordinary men living and working on the margins of the sprawling city of Johannesburg: a statistician taking the national census, a sanitary engineer out on the town, an artist with an interest in genocide and a contractor putting up billboards. The minutiae of their daily lives are examined, echoing and underlining the choices each of us makes: where and how to live, what we try to create, and our expectations and disappointments.
This being South Africa still coming to terms with the end of Apartheid, racial tensions and poverty are never far away. There is always an underlying, sometimes explicit sense of unease and menace, as if at any moment the daily predictability of life might be threatened, as in the section, The Exploded View where the reassuring image of plans and instructions that the character has relied on suddenly changes: as if every solid thing had been exploded gently.
Vladislavic is a writer with a dazzling array of linguistic and narrative skills at his command. His language is fresh and exciting, as well as playful and satirical, throwing up unexpected images and ideas. When the artist is unpacking a crate of masks of dubious origin:
Every time he threw out a handful of shredded newsprint, expecting to see the blond pine bottom of the box, he found another layer gazing up as astonished as stowaways.
Through his spare prose we glimpse ordinary things from a new and almost alien point of view.
Egan always found it strange to set foot for the first time in a place he knew from the plans. It was like folding out of two dimensions into three. You could almost hear the creases popping as you broke through the barrier.
This is a novel to savour, and it lingers in the mind long after it has ended. As a reader new to Ivan Vladislavic’s work I’m looking forward to reading more of his novels and short stories, and will be recommending him widely.

<p>Ooh, it made me heart sad, <A href="https://www.librarything.com/work/3705414/book/160524540">The Exploded View</a>. It's overwhelmingly beautiful, but absolutely sad (exception of first story about a Nice Guy™, which almost every woman in the world knows means he's really a creep, although I guess while it fails the <i>beautiful</i> moniker, it's still sad, since I'm sure if you asked creepy dude, he'd say he's in love, not creepy at all.) And beautiful is wrong too -- it isn't vistas and sunsets, but beautiful in some other, intangible way that writing sometimes is when it's describing sadness and potential and how we fail each other. The stories are all loosely tied together via a housing estate in South Africa (and by loose, I mean loose. Sometimes the tie is that the housing estate is off in the distance). And it ends with the looming threat of death, and the stories hang over you like that, days (months -- I am so far behind in reviews) later. Death is overhanging me.</p>

<p><A href="https://www.librarything.com/work/3705414/book/160524540">The Exploded View</a> by Ivan Vladislavić went on sale March 28, 2017.</p>

<p><small>I received a copy free from <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> in exchange for an honest review.</small></p>