Description

Dropout Neville Lister accompanies acclaimed photographer Saul Auerbach for a day, to learn a lesson for life. They play a game: from a hill above Johannesburg they pick three houses and decide to knock on their doors in search of a story. Auerbach’s images of the first two will become classic portraits, but soon the light fades. Lister only reaches the third house decades later, returning to post-apartheid South Africa and a Johannesburg altered almost beyond recognition. How to live when estranged from your birthplace? What do you lose when you are no longer lost?

Double Negative is a subtle triptych that captures the ordinary life of Neville Lister during South Africa’s extraordinary revolution. Ivan Vladislavic lays moments side by side like photographs on a table. He lucidly portrays a city and its many lives through reflections on memory, art and what we should really be looking for.

Publisher Review

'Vladislavic's narrative intelligence [is] nowhere more visible than in his way with language itself. Each section is perfectly judged; we enter incidents in medias res - as though they were piano etudes - and exit them before we have overstayed our welcome.' Teju Cole ------- 'Vladislavic is sensitively attuned to the uncanny phenomena that explode from the social fault lines of his city.' Patrick Flanery, The Guardian ------- 'Well received in his homeland, this publication marks the long-overdue arrival of one of South Africa's most finely tuned observers.' Ted Hodgkinson, The Times Literary Supplement ------- 'This book coheres resplendently by its metaphorical underpinnings, by something rare in the world of contemporary fiction: meaning ... Double Negative listens carefully to the sound of the ebb and flow of history and transcribes it in lucid, rigorous prose; Vladislavic is no minor congener of Sebald.' Neel Mukherjee, The Independent ------- 'A tone of bemused artistic entrapment in random patterns permeates this wonderfully soft-spoken novel, which reminds me very much of the work of J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald and P. Auster. Double Negative even feels slightly fresher than the recent publications from these three giants of quirky flat-voiced first-person narrative postmodernism. Ivan Vladislavic is not actually a new voice in fiction, it turns out - he's been publishing novels for decades - but he was new to me when I picked up Double Negative, and this accessible novel may help him reach a larger audience.' Levi Asher ------- 'One of the most imaginative minds at work in South African literature today.' Andre Brink ------- 'Double Negative was worth the wait.' The Quarterly Conversation ------- 'A rare, brilliant writer. Vladislavic's work eschews all cant. Its sheer verve distinguishes it.' Sunday Times (SA)------- 'Vladislavic seeks the poetry of the city he has known and loved for 30 years ... He finds the human behind Johannesburg's sorry reputation.' Ross Leckie, The Times (SA)------- 'Deft, effortless and funny ... Double Negative shows one of South Africa's foremost writers in full flow.' Craig MacKenzie, Mail & Guardian ------- Double Negative is about, among other things, how art relates to life and history, if you like - and its severe limits, which may also be its strengths - The book is ambitious but resolutely unassuming; it is a triumph, if anything so sceptical, so taking due care, can be called such.' Charles Boyle, The Warwick Review ------- 'Double Negative is exceptionally well written. It captures an everyday life against the backdrop of South Africa's incredible revolution in an engaging portrait of a city and its many diverse citizens.' Kryosmagica -------