The Exploded View

The Exploded View, from the masterful South African novelist Ivan Vladislavić, tells the story of four lives intertwined through the sprawling infrastructure on the margins of Johannesburg: a statistician taking the national census, an engineer out on the town with city officials, an artist interested in genocide, and a contractor who puts up billboards on construction sites. Arcing across distance and time, Vladislavić deftly explodes our comfortable views and brings us behind the curtains of the city while subtly expanding our notions of what is possible in the novel form.

Ivan Vladislavić was born in Pretoria in 1957 and lives in Johannesburg. His books include the novels The Restless Supermarket, The Exploded View, and Double Negative, and a compendium of short stories titled Flashback Hotel. In 2006, he published "Portrait with Keys," a sequence of documentary texts on Johannesburg. He has edited books on architecture and art, and sometimes works with artists and photographers. TJ/Double Negative, a joint project with photographer David Goldblatt, received the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Award for best photography book. His work has also won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the Alan Paton Award and the University of Johannesburg Prize. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Department at Wits University.