Lost in Joburg: Ivan Vladislavić’s The Restless Supermarket

Nobody writes about faux-Tuscan shopping malls and the “complex country” of gated communities on the urban edge quite like Vladislavić – the Montecasinos and Villa Venetos where the city’s boundaries are “drifting away, sliding over pristine ridges and valleys, lodging in tenuous places, slipping again”. “Nature is for other people, in other places,” the narrator of Portrait with Keys remarks: “We have planted a forest the birds endorse. For hills, we have mine dumps covered with grass.” Taking certain things less seriously, it frees itself up for the very serious business of understanding what a relentlessly privatised world might be doing to us, to our subjectivities and our ways of relating to others.