The Exploded View [Paperback]

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 Johhanesburg: a stastician 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.  ...[A] startling collection by the South African writer Ivan Vladislavić ... each protagonist in the four stories of The Exploded View is engaged in an effort to parse and pin down his post-apartheid nation; together, though, the stories suggest the fatuity of classification. — Hermione Hoby, The New Yorker

A stimulating journey around Johannesburg and into the restless minds of its inhabitants... A sense of unease often permeates these subtly linked tales, which skillfully lay out a disorienting blueprint of modern Johannesburg. —Publishers Weekly(Starred Review)

Vladislavic's plain and understated style gives force to the longing and frustrated desires of his characters. —Kirkus Reviews

The Exploded View is a small masterpiece by one of the best writers working today. — Jan Steyn, The Quarterly Conversation

The writing has a quality of unpredictability, a wildness that seeps through the fabric of Vladislavic's peerless linguistic control. -- Katie Kitamatura,BOMB Magazine 
   
Vladislavic is without doubt the most significant writer in South Africa today. --Focus on Africa
  
These stories, which could well be considered a novel il£+