Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT)

Summary

New Books Network: "Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments"
Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson on Writing, Johannesburg, and Literary Inheritance
(Aired: May 7, 2026)

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Episode Overview

This episode of "Novel Dialogue" on the New Books Network brings together celebrated South African novelist and essayist Ivan Vladislavić and leading African literary scholar Jeanne-Marie Jackson. Hosted by Magalia Miasticeda, the conversation centers on how place—especially Johannesburg—shapes literary form, genre, and the act of writing itself. Drawing on Vladislavić’s career from his debut novel The Folly (1993) to his latest work The Near North (2024), the discussion traverses themes of urban transformation, the challenge of representing a fragmentary and unstable landscape, and how techniques such as listing and inventory function both stylistically and philosophically in his oeuvre.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Johannesburg as a Literary City

• [03:49] Defining Johannesburg
  • Vladislavić describes Johannesburg as a "famously unlovable" city, marked by a utilitarian economic origin ("founded...to dig gold out of the ground") rather than an inherent aesthetic appeal.
  • The city "doesn't open itself to newcomers and visitors easily"—understanding it requires time, and even then "the city will slap you down," constantly reminding you how little you know it.
  • As a writer, Vladislavić is drawn to this "challenge," highlighting the city's constant transformation as compelling narrative material.
  • Quote:
    "For a writer, it's a very changeable city...your materials are changing as you're working with them. That insider knowledge that a lot of writers feed off escapes you, constantly slips through your fingers." — Vladislavić [05:02]

The Importance of "Getting Lost"

• [07:48] Lostness as a Literary Device
  • Early in his relationship with Johannesburg, Vladislavić would randomly select spots on a map and venture out, allowing the city to reveal itself through disorientation.
  • He connects this to the character's "game" in Double Negative and likens his approach to Georges Perec's experiments ("throwing a dart at the map and going to see what's there").
  • In the era of digital mapping and increased urban risk, intentional disorientation is harder to achieve—he notes nostalgia for “handing over the control to the city.”
  • Quote:
    "You have to make a conscious effort to leave the technology behind...I like the idea of somehow handing over the control to the city by being in a place that's unfamiliar and seeing what it delivers." — Vladislavić [08:56]

Place, Transformation, and Literary Fragments

• [14:28] Magalia’s Provocation on Place
  • The episode explores how attempts to "fix" place—whether via fiction, reportage, or photography—inevitably fail because both city and country consistently transform.
  • Vladislavić agrees, suggesting that "the great subject is actually the transformation of the landscape...the city out from under you."
  • Fragmentation as a Structural Principle
    • He describes structuring Double Negative as "cross sections through time," interrupted by significant gaps ("the rubbing together of pieces, the clashing of pieces").
    • This technique, echoing the reality that "place presents itself to you in fragments," is driven by the material's demands rather than a willful stylistic choice.
  • Quote:
    "The city, in a way...cannot be grasped whole. It has to be grasped in pieces or in fragments. That was my thinking behind the structure of Double Negative..." — Vladislavić [15:22]

Lists, Inventories, and the Limits of Narrative

• [19:11] Lists as a Hallmark Device
  • Jackson notes the recurrence of lists and inventories in Vladislavić’s novels (The Folly, The Near North), calling attention to their dual playfulness and documentary ambition.
  • Vladislavić reflects that early on, lists were "continuous with the play that goes on through the whole novel...very aware of the potential for play in language itself."
  • Over time, the function of lists evolves: in later works, lists attempt to "grasp something about the world...to exhaust the place," following in the footsteps of Perec’s inventories.
  • He connects the presence of lists to an unease with linear narrative, seeing the breakdown in syntax and order as both risk and possibility.
  • Quote:
    "The list is the place where the language fails in a way, where the syntax fails...suddenly it just disintegrates into a whole lot of possibilities, a big clutter of words. That's the place where the sort of communicative narrative function fails."
    — Vladislavić [27:11]

Literary Genealogy: Afrikaans Influence

• [27:11] On English vs. Afrikaans Literary Traditions
  • Jackson provocatively suggests Vladislavić belongs more in the experimental Afrikaans tradition than the English South African lineage.
  • Vladislavić discusses his formative years at Wits University (mid-1970s), reading both English and Afrikaans literature. He credits the radical, avant-garde Afrikaans canon—with its overlap of visceral language and formal experimentation—as a major influence.
  • He notes the unique immediacy when studying Afrikaans: reading contemporary texts as they were published, versus the remote English syllabus.
  • The experimental American (postmodernist) authors he read for pleasure (Vonnegut, Barthelme) also felt closer to Afrikaans experimentation than to the English tradition.
  • Quote:
    “It wasn’t common...for an English speaker to go and study Afrikaans literature. The radical experimental tradition was certainly not what I got in my Afrikaans lessons at school. So it was a very big revelation...discovering this extraordinary, vital literature.” — Vladislavić [32:23]

Formative Influence: The Writer’s Notebook

• [36:31] Signature Question: A Favorite Teacher
  • Vladislavić names his high school English teacher, Gavin Wilmot, as a foundational influence.
  • Wilmot introduced students to literature, humor, and music outside the narrow apartheid-era syllabus, instilling in Vladislavić a curiosity and openness to forms.
  • Importantly, Wilmot encouraged the writer's notebook:
    "You can write anything you like in here and it won’t be graded...but I will read it."
  • This practice became core to Vladislavić’s lifelong writing habits:
    • Quote:
      "It became a lifelong habit. The habit of keeping notebooks, which is very much part of my writing practice, goes back to that moment of someone saying, what is a writer's notebook? Well, it's just the thing where you write anything down." — Vladislavić [36:47]

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Johannesburg:
  "Johannesburg is a place that you look on through a particular window. And capturing it whole is quite difficult, I think, for any one writer." — Vladislavić [12:01]
• On Place and Time:
  "Time and the ordering of time becomes the challenge for narrativizing that." — Magalia Miasticeda [14:28]
• On Literary Failed Sums:
  "Place presents itself to you in fragments and pieces, that it's not a willful imposition, that the material requires that kind of treatment." — Vladislavić [15:22]
• On Literary Inheritance:
  "There was definitely a disconnect between that reading and that literature and the world around me. So this feeling that there were books that were immediately about your own society...was really exciting." — Vladislavić [32:23]
• On the Writer's Notebook:
  "It was an absolute godsend...he would read it and give me commentary on that. And it was just between the two of us. And it's...still something that I do today." — Vladislavić [36:47]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:49] — Defining Johannesburg as a literary city
• [07:48] — The role of getting lost and technology’s impact
• [14:28] — Place and transformation; narrative structure as fragments
• [19:11] — The significance of lists and inventories in fiction
• [27:11] — South African literary genealogy and the Afrikaans tradition
• [36:31] — The impact of teaching and the writer’s notebook

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Episode Flow and Tone

The conversation is collegial, intellectually playful, and deeply engaged with both literary craft and the specificities of place. Vladislavić offers thoughtful, sometimes self-deprecating reflections, often broadening Jackson's incisive questions into meditations on the relationship between literature and lived reality. The tone is invitational, rich with anecdotal warmth and scholarly generosity, making it accessible to both specialist and general audiences.

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This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in African urban writing, literary form, and the creative life lived in and through language’s fragments.

Transcript

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[Magalia Miasticeda]

as directed welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to Novel Dialogue, a podcast that brings together critics and novelists to talk about how novels work and about how we work in relation to novels. We're sponsored by the Society for Novel Studies and produced in partnership with Public Books, an online magazine of arts, ideas and scholarship. I'm Magalia Miasticeda, one of your hosts for this season. For today's episode, we're thrilled to have with us Ivan Vladislavich, the South African novelist, essayist and editor in conversation with Jean Marie Jackson. Celebrated by KT Kitamura as one of the most significant writers working in English today, Ivan is a razor sharp chronicler of contemporary South Africa. His work includes the novels the Folly, the Restless Supermarket, Double negative, and from 2019 the distance, as well as collections of short stories and a series of collaborations and experiments with the interplay of fiction and nonfiction. Double Negative was composed as part of a collaboration with the photographer David Goldblatt, while Portrait with Keys from 2006 and most recently the Near north, published in 2024, combined reportage and impressionistic vignettes to narrate Johannesburg as a city in transformation. Ivan is also a Distinguished professor in Creative Writing at Witz University in Johannesburg and, I'll add, has many fans amongst the Novel Dialogue team. Our slack lit up with delight at the news that he would be appearing on the podcast. Jean Marie, for her part, is a driving force in African literary studies and herself a delight. Her books include South African Literature's Russian Soul, Narrative Forms of Global Isolation, the African Novel of Ideas, Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing, and most recently, the Letter of the Law and J.E. caseleigh Hayford's West Africa, published earlier this year. Her work has also appeared in a range of academic and public facing venues, including the New York Times, N1 and of course, Public Books. She's a professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and currently director of Hopkins's Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. Now, before handing things over to Jean Marie and Ivan, I'm going to add that given the scope of Ivan's work, we've chosen three points of reference as coordinates for our conversation today the novel The Folly from 1993 and Double Negative from 2010, and the Near north from 2024. Welcome to Novel Dialogue, Ivan and Jean Marie.

[Jean Marie Jackson]

Thank you so much, Magaly, and thank you, Ivan, for being part of this with us.

[Ivan Vladislavich]

Thank you for the invitation. I'm delighted to be here.

[Jean Marie Jackson]

Well, I was hoping we could start pretty broadly for the benefit of readers who maybe haven't had the experience of reading your work yet. And I wanted to ask you, what defines Johannesburg for you as a literary city? And I'm thinking especially of one line that I love from Double Negative, which is that the poetry of the moment made me long for the prose of Johannesburg. I completely relate to that. Johannesburg is a city, I have to say, that personally took me many, many years to warm up to and now I love it. But I don't think it's a city that strikes everyone immediately as having an especially literary character. So I wanted to ask you why it lacks poetry specifically, first of all, and as a sort of follow up, a little mini question to that, how the city has across your career, facilitated, or maybe better to say, demanded, such an easy blurring of different kinds of prose. So fiction, memoir, Romana, clef, reportage, as Magaly mentioned.

[Ivan Vladislavich]

Thanks for the question. Johannesburg's famously unlovable. A lot of people dislike the city, but a lot of people think it's very ugly. It's a place that doesn't open itself to newcomers and visitors easily in terms of understanding how it works. Although it's very welcoming to outsiders, I think on the whole, yeah, it's a city that was really founded for quite pragmatic purposes. It had an economic genesis to dig gold out of the ground. And so people who've come here generally come to work. It's a working place. It's not a place that people Come to relax. And I think I came to Johannesburg escaping from Pretoria, which is nearby, 60km away. I grew up there. I came to Johannesburg as a student because Johannesburg was a big city and an exciting city and somewhat dangerous place in some ways, if you grew up where I did, and I think so, that was some of the initial appeal, was getting to what qualified as a big city. And I think over the years, becoming familiar with the place, you discover its secrets to a certain extent, and you find your way around, and that makes you feel comfortable. And then almost inevitably, the city will slap you down and tell you not to get too big for your boots, and you discover that you don't know it that well. And I think for a writer, it's a very changeable city. It's been through massive changes in the. In the odd 50 odd years that I've lived here. The city has passed through such enormous changes that it feels in many ways like an entirely different place. And I think that's a challenging situation for a writer because your materials are changing as you're working with them. That insider knowledge that a lot of writers feed off escapes. You constantly kind of slips through your fingers. And so you have to work especially hard to keep up, to try and understand the place. And I think that challenges part of what has made this a literary city. Getting to grips with it, getting under the obvious surface of things and trying to figure out what makes it tick.

[Jean Marie Jackson]

I wonder if you could also take a stab at connecting this to your emphasis throughout your career on getting lost again, especially going back to Double Negative, the game that the main character, you know, kind of loosely autobiographical, I take it, would play with his father, of lying down in the backseat, you know, of the old bends. Right. I think it was. And trying to figure out where you were in the city just by feel. But then also as you take your work into its current iteration or most recent iteration in the near north, trying to refract Johannesburg through tech and Google Street View and using Google Maps and the difficulty of continuing to be able to get lost as it's mapped in these new ways. How is lostness itself essential to Johannesburg's literary character or texture for you?

[Ivan Vladislavich]

It was certainly a way in which I discovered the city. When I first came here and I began walking. One of my strategies for getting to know Johannesburg was to open the. The book of maps at random and find a place to go to and just head out there and walk around and see what was there. And I think this is echoed in a way in double negative by the game that Auerbach plays from up on the hill, when he randomly selects houses from looking down on a suburb, randomly selects houses to go to. And the idea is that everywhere is interesting if you look properly, if you look carefully enough. And so there was something of that. And I guess it's like something of George Perrick's approach to things in this game, of just, you know, throwing a dart at the map and then saying, go there and see what's there. So that was partly how I discovered the city was literally getting. Getting lost, going to a place where I didn't know my way around. And as you say, it was easier to get lost a few years ago, before we had phones in our hands and GPS to guide us every step of the way. It's quite difficult now to find yourself really disoriented in that way. You have to make a conscious effort to leave the technology behind. Of course, it's also become rather risky to just go anywhere in Johannesburg and walk around. So the knowledge of places and knowing where you're going has become a little bit more pressing as the city has become rather risky place to walk around for most people. But I like the idea of somehow handing over the control to the city in a way, by being in a place that's unfamiliar and seeing what it delivers. You know, you remind me. Now talk. Speaking of the subject, you remind me of Zoe Wickham's you Can't get lost in Cape Town.

[Jean Marie Jackson]

Of course. Yeah.

[Ivan Vladislavich]

And it ties in quite nicely because in a sense, that the big mark of orientation in Cape Town would be the mountain and this notion that you. You can't avoid it. Wherever you are, you will always be able to see the mountain. The most obvious feature of the landscape. It's not entirely true, but that sense of not being able to get lost because the landscape is so imposing, because it's so visible all the time.

[Jean Marie Jackson]

So curious reading, especially the near north and your slightly prolonged autobiographical reflections. I think, in comparison to previous work of yours, whether the idea of a Gauteng novel or a Gauteng narrative has any traction for you, I don't.

[Ivan Vladislavich]

I would say if I can take a step back, I'm not sure that Johannesburg enables that project either, because I think the notion of the quintessential Johannesburg book might be quite a tricky one. I think there's so many Johannesburgs. Well, thank you. But there are so many versions of the city, and people do live in the city in such different ways that I think there's a growing shelf of books about the city, that's for sure. Quite an impressive library of books by now. Considering that it's not a very old city. And there's been a lot written from, you know, social histories and novels and books on the architecture and so on. When you put them all together, you get a wonderful picture of the city. But I think that on the whole. Johannesburg is a place that you look on through a particular window. And capturing it whole is quite difficult, I think, for any one writer. I'm very glad if you think that I get somewhere there. The idea of a Gauteng novel. Gauteng is a relatively new construct. The provincial structure with nine provinces. Only really came into existence with the new South Africa. When the four old provinces were reorganized. Demarcated into nine provinces. And I'll be frank and say that I don't have a particularly strong sense of living in Gauteng. I've kind of wouldn't say. I've held onto the notion that I'm in the Transvaal. Because that's very much in the past. That's very much a construct of the old South Africa. Which I long ago put behind me. When I grew up. As a child, the Transvaal was a strong entity for me. Being a Transvaal, I had some meaning to me. With the planning of the remapping of the country into nine provinces. And I became a Gautenga. I have some kind of sense of belonging to this part of the world. But I don't have a very strong sense of Gating as a. As an entity. So I'm not really sure.

[Jean Marie Jackson]

I wanted to jump in with a

[Magalia Miasticeda]

question, actually, along these lines. And maybe a bit of a provocation. So what I find so interesting about this discussion about writing place. Is that it seems like the great subject is actually the non fixity of place. Whether we're talking about Johannesburg as a city. Or also just the changing topography of South Africa. Right. That it's one thing before 1994. And a very different thing after 1994. And so with the proposition the great subject is actually the transformation of the landscape. And the city out from under you. To some extent that whether through fiction, nonfiction. And, I think also photography. Right. These things that seem to promise a fixing. Into something that could be the great novel of a city. The city seems to keep escaping. And so time. And the ordering of time. Becomes the challenge for narrativizing that.

[Ivan Vladislavich]

I think the city, in a way. And perhaps the country. To take an even larger view. Cannot be grasped whole. It has to be grasped in pieces or in fragments. I think that was my thinking behind the structure of Double Negative was to kind of take cross sections through time rather than write a continuous chronological linear novel that just unfolded in some neat way, to actually take three cross sections through time with big gaps in between. And then the challenge was to try and pick up the narrative in each successive section and. And somehow bring the past into the present without overloading each section in the book. And then. So I think that in a way, although you write that the book is more linear, it also proceeds by a kind of the rubbing together of pieces, right, the clashing of pieces. And it's in the big holes in between that I think that some of the interest of the book might lie. And maybe that's not that different to the near north, where in fact you have a kind of these two bookends which are creating some suggestion of a linear progression from lockdown one to lockdown two, and then in between the shift back into the past. But really what's happening is a whole lot of observations which are in fact drawn from across that whole span of time, but are woven into a particular. Into a particular moment. So I think that perhaps the structuring devices underneath it all are rather similar. But the key thing is that notion that the place presents itself to you in fragments and pieces, that it's not a willful. It's not a willful imposition that the material requires that kind of treatment. I mean, I know that a lot of my work looks fragmentary, but I think it looks like that because I really am trying to respond to the material which feels that way.

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[Jean Marie Jackson]

I want to go from this big broad subject of Johannesburg as a literary city, Johannesburg as a literary topography and all that we've been speaking about to a much more zoomed in question about a technique that I noticed this time around, reading through the Folly, your very first novel, which I hadn't read in quite a few years. I think I taught it about five years ago, most recently, so it was a real treat to me to go back to it and took on new resonance in my own understanding of your work. But in conversation with the near north in particular, you mentioned already Georges Carrec, and one of the ways that you introduce him into the near north is through discussion of the inventory, what you call the inventory form, and his work as a documentarian specifically. I had been taking notes already to that point on lists and all of the recurrence of lists in the Folly especially. But then I started to think that it was one of your hallmark or kind of trademark devices, and that your discussion of Joel's Perek was something like what the Russian formalists would call a laying bare of the device or in Russian, right, you are declaring this thing that you do because you actually want to disclose it to your readers. So I went back and if you don't mind, I marked a couple of the lists or inventories in the Folly that I thought I could just share briefly with our listeners and then get you to speak a little bit about what they do for you and also how your use of inventories or lists may have evolved over this long haul. Or if your career going back to 1993, right all the way up to 2024. And there are so many of these. There's another one that I marked on page 91 of the Archipelago edition of the Folly boot, camouflage, combat chopper, Soviet made, collapsible, traditional weapon, assegai, knotchiri, banga, pike, bowl, stick, stone, brick, mortarboard, fountain pen, paper clip, rubber stamp, gavel, sickle, spade, break, hoe spoke, knitting needle, crochet hook, darning, egg, butter knife, runcible spoon, pot, pan, gritty boat, whisk and I could go on from there. I will not, obviously, but it's something that you do a lot, something that you are evidently intrigued by in this laying bare of the device with Daet that you introduce in the Near North. And I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about why.

[Ivan Vladislavich]

Well, I think you're right that it is a striking quality of the writing. It struck me as well, looking over the work as. Which I. Which I have to do occasionally, as I had to do for our discussion to go back to things I haven't looked at for a long time. And I glanced over the Folly yesterday, and I was actually struck by the same thing. Strangely enough, it's a quality I've recognized before. But it also struck me with particular force looking over the text.

[Jean Marie Jackson]

Yeah.

[Ivan Vladislavich]

And I think that one of the things that it marks in my early work, I think it was a. It was play, you know, when one goes. When I go back to my first novel, it's quite strange for me to approach it. I have to approach it as a reader in a certain way because I can't really imagine myself back into the situation of being the writer of that text. So I have to look at it almost as a reader would and say, well, what's that about? And I think the lists in the Folly are part of. Continuous with the play that goes on through the whole novel. So the whole thing is playful. And the whole thing is very aware of the potential for play in language itself. And so I think some of them. Some of the lists. The lists serve a kind of stitching together function. They dropped into the text at moments where I'm trying to get from one point of the point to another. So they have a kind of narrative function. But really they. There I think they are fairly purely exuberant when I'm writing them. The function they end up playing in the text is rather different, I think, because they. Because the central conceit of the thing is this contrast between the kind of visionary and the pragmatic. So the never nascent character who has this vision and is a dreamer. And the hardware man, Mr. Hardware. Mr. Malchus, the pragmatic hardware man. In the end, all of these objects, this clutter of things, ends up being the kind of weight of the world. In a way, it's Mr. Hardware's stuff that's weighing down everything. Never Nasan's objects, which are also inventoried from time to time, are kind of debris. They're quite fragile things that can get swept away quite easily. They're makeshift things. Whereas Mr. Hardware comes with all of these ornaments and bric a brac and all of this stuff. And he kind of brings this, this kind of middle class display cabinet clutter into the novel. And so in that. So it ends up being this sort of ballast that somehow keeps things on the. Keeps things weighted. That's what I think. That's one of the functions that plays in the end. But when I'm writing the book, I imagine that I'm just fooling around a lot of the time. I'm just lapsing into this language, into this listing. I think later on, if one, if I, if I look over my, my. My work as a whole, there's more of a documentary impetus later with the listing. So by the time I get to portrait with Keys has some aspects of that. And then it's more perian in a way. It's about making inventories and lists as a way of grasping something about the world, grasping it in a more or less complete way. So then it becomes a small conceptual kind of a play. It's not just a language, a language thing becomes more of a play around a more conceptually based attempt to exhaust the place, as SP would put it, to try and seize it through the language. And then I suppose in the end, what strikes me, I wrote a short piece about this. I think I actually put it into the loss library, my book, the loss library, that the list in a way is always disturbing to the reader. And I imagine, and it sort of disturbs the writer in the same way. The list is the place where the language fails in a way where the syntax fails. So you're going along, you're going along on the, on the paradigm, you're going along on the syntax, and you're going along at least on the syntax or on the syntagm. And then when you get to a list and suddenly it just disintegrates into a whole lot of possibilities, a big clutter of words. That's the place where the sort of communicative narrative function fails. And so maybe it's also my distrust of linear narrative, maybe it's my. These sort of lapses into just the listing is somehow signaling my distrust of the kind of propulsive linear narrative.

[Jean Marie Jackson]

I understand that you studied Afrikaans at wits. You were a double major, I believe, right? In English and Afrikaans literature. Afrikaans is a shared interest. I don't know that it will be apparent to everyone tuning in for this. It's a pretty deep divide in the South African literary landscape, certainly in the academy, you know, the, the stereotypical version is that you have, as you would call it in double negative, this kind of wishy washy liberalism, right of the English language novelists. Often an unfair assignation, I think. And you obviously are taking that test out of it to some extent when you're bringing it up. And then you have the more radical, more experimental end of the literary life of South Africa in Afrikaans. I think that's something that as a part time scholar of Afrikaans literature, I often have to explain to people that when you study Afrikaans literature, you are doing in many ways the opposite of studying Afrikaans politics and Afrikaans political history. And in fact, you know, the. The conservatism and hardline dimensions of Afrikaner political history are what. What gives birth to the possibility of a real avant garde and this kind of deep experimentalism of the literary life of that land, language. So I'm going to throw out a provocation now which I will then dress up as a question which is that if I were asked off the cuff to place you. To place your work within any kind of cohort or periodicity in South African literature, I think, and your attachment to the guttural, visceral materiality of language in the way that you're constantly playing with kind of literalizing figures and figuratizing very literal, you know, sort of listy inventory accounts of Johannesburg and of Gauteng. I'd be very hard pressed to give you a real English South African literary genealogy or cohort, to be honest. And I wonder what you make of that and whether you would be open to the idea of kind of locating yourself within an Afrikaans literary genealogy.

[Ivan Vladislavich]

Yeah, I mean, I've been asked about my relationship to the Afrikaans writers, to the literature before, but no one has ever suggested that I might be an Afrikaans writer undercover, 30 speed. So that's. Yeah, it's a very. That's a really interesting perspective. I can certainly. I can see why you would say that. And I think some of it is quite practical reasons why my work, for instance, might resemble Ingrid Winterbach's early work. That when I was studying Afrikaans writing in the mid-70s with John Miles and Ampi Coetzeer and an a couple of other people, the key text I was studying was Etienne Deroux, for instance. Of course, it was a very big influence on my work and one that I absolutely acknowledge. Winterbach has a direct relationship with Leroux. Winterbach writes, I don't know you probably, I'm sure you know the story that as Letty Fulune, she writes, you know, she writes, enters into a correspondence with Etienne Leroux as a young writer and he sort of mentors her and she's always acknowledged Leroux as one of her. The main influence on her own literary life. And I think one could trace that sort of set of texts that were formative for me. Studying Afrikaans at wits in the 70s, reading Breitenbach and reading the early Brink and so on, John Miles himself, reading Miles's early novels. And then all the story writers, the dozens of wonderful story writers. I think I fall under the influence of the same set of writers that I think a lot of the writers you're talking about, Marlene, for instance, Marlene Vanica, is writing from almost the same set of reference points. And then, of course, there's a whole lot of other. I mean, there's such a. As you well know, influence is a very, very complex thing. But certainly there's an overlap there, which is quite an. It's unusual simply because it wasn't that common, not common at all, for English, an English speaker to go and study Afrikaans literature.

[Jean Marie Jackson]

Exactly.

[Ivan Vladislavich]

And that's. I mean, it's. It's that simple. I went to. I went to university with the notion that I would read a lot of books. That was the main reason I went. And I wanted to read novels and read fiction and so on. And so I decided I'll study Afrikaans. I didn't know much about the tradition that you're talking about. The radical experimental tradition was certainly not what I got in my Afrikaans lessons at school. So it was a very big revelation for me, arriving at university and discovering this extraordinary, vital literature. And it also has the effect, which I've spoken about before, that it generates a feeling in me of the immediate power of literature and the importance of it in the moment. Because in the Afrikaans department, we're studying writers who are writing right then and there. And we're studying books that are, like, hot off the press as they come out. We're reading them. And in the English department, where I'm also studying, we're still studying. We're studying the canon. And it doesn't go much past the Second World War. You know, we. I had one, if I remember correctly, one elective in my entire English studies on the modern novel. Right. In three years of study. And that was, you know, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and so on. But apart from that, you read no contemporary literature. Now, in a sense, I'm not sorry. In fact, I'm not sorry at all that I was made to read the canon. But there was definitely a disconnect between that reading and that literature and the world around me. And so this feeling that there were books that were immediately about your own society and that had an urgent connection to what was happening in the world around you that was really exciting. And so it's an. Undoubtedly had a huge influence on my own direction as a writer. The other thing that's maybe an interesting way of looking at it is that the English writing that did appeal to me in those years is the early American postmodernist. At the same time as I'm studying in the Afrikaans department, I was also reading for my own pleasure, know Vonnegut and Don Bartleme and these people. And they felt much more connected to the Afrikaans literature I was reading than they did to the English tradition, which is largely. Well, it's largely realist in South Africa. There are exceptions, and I think that's also been flattened out to some extent. So the experimental strand in Gordima, for instance, is quite conveniently ignored when people take Gaudima as the sort of the great example of this realist tradition. Actually, she's got a lot. There's a lot of experimentation in her work, too. So I think when Sibu came from, not to flatten it out, but on the whole, the writers that I was reading, if I cast my mind back now, the English writers that I was reading, the British writers I was reading, take Kingsley, Amos or John Wayne or those kinds of writers who. The angry young men crew who was reading at the same time as the American, early American postmodernists, they feel much more like they're part of an old tradition. So the more exciting experimental American fiction also meshes with that experimental Afrikaans work, which I think comes, in fact comes largely out of European, out of Dutch and French experimental writing rather than out of the American tradition. But for me as a reader, as a young reader and writer, there's a meshing of the two.

[Magalia Miasticeda]

So as we're coming to the end of this conversation, it's my turn to ask the signature question, which is a question that we ask all of our guests in a given season of novel dialogue. And this season's signature question is for Ivan, who was your favorite teacher?

[Ivan Vladislavich]

Well, I've had some very wonderful teachers, including university lecturers, but I've acknowledged many of them in one way or another. So I thought I would actually mention my high school English teacher, who was a man called Gavin Wilmot. And he came to our school as this, as a teaching student. So he did his practical work as part of his teaching degree. He came to our school and taught our class, and then he came back a year or two later as a qualified teacher and became my class teacher. So he was very young and he was a sort of. He was an Anglophile, pipe smoking jacket wearing kind of person. And he was an enormous influence, I think, on the course of my life in some ways. He was a very witty teacher, loved engaging with the pupils, kind of swapping puns, joking around and so on. But there were two key things that I think really had a lasting impact on me. And one was that he introduced us to all kinds of things outside of the syllabus and what was actually a very confining syllabus. I'm talking about the early 70s when the school Christian national education curriculum was very constrained. And so he had a particular love for certain kind of English humor. So he introduced us to things like the Goon Show. He had recordings of the Goon show, which was Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, BBC Radio comedy. Very surreal, very wacky comedy for its day. He used to bring a portable record player into the classroom and play us things on record, right? And he played us the Goon Show. He played us things like Gilbert and Sullivan I would never have come across in the ordinary course of my life. He also played us those extraordinary recordings that Dylan Thomas did of his own reading, his own work. And an incredible thing which has never left me is the recording is, I think it's called On a Child's Christmas in Wales, which Dylan Thomas did on BBC Radio, I think. So he. Yeah, he brought. He bought these things and then he was. He brought these things into our lives which we would never otherwise have come across. He was also a passionate fan of Mad magazine and that was a very strange thing for a teacher to be because we were always being so ushered away from comics of any kind. And he loved Mad magazine and he loved it especially for the parody, the movie parodies that Mad used to run. And he always encouraged us to read those. And then there was one. So that was the one side of it and there are a lot of other things like that that I could mention. But the other thing is that he introduced this idea of the writer's notebook into our class. And I must have been about maybe 13 or so. I was in standard seven, so just into high school. And he. At the beginning of the year, he dished out the exercise books and said, this is a writer's notebook and you can write anything you like in here and it won't be graded, it won't be marked, it's not part of the syllabus, but I will read it. Whatever you're writing there, I will read and tell you what I think. And, you know, I don't think there were too many takers. I can't imagine that too many of my, my peers were enthusiastically taking their notebooks on to write compositions that they didn't need to write. But I was really, you know, want, want to write, wanting to write. And so it was an absolute godsend. So I began writing in the writer's notebook and he would read it and give me commentary on that. And was just between the two of us. And it's a lifelong, it became a lifelong habit. The habit of keeping notebooks, which is very much part of my writing practice, goes back to that moment of someone saying, what is a writer's notebook? Well, it's just the thing where you write anything down. I remember going to say, what should I put in here? Anything you like. You can write anything you like in here. And that's, that was kind of a really transformative thing for me. And as I said, it's, it's still something that I do. Today.

[Magalia Miasticeda]

At the conclusion of another Novel Dialogue episode, we'd like to thank the Society for Novel Studies for its sponsorship, Public Books for its partnership, and the Rick Edelman College of Communication, Humanities and Social Sciences at Rowan University for its support. Beck Daly is our production intern, and Connor Hibbard is our sound engineer. Check out recent episodes of the podcast with Lauren Buches, Masandin Shtanga, Teju Cole and Katie Kitamura. And if you liked what you've heard, please subscribe. Wherever you get your podcasts from all of us here at Novel Dialogue, thank you for listening and thank you, Ivan and Jean Marie, for wonderful conversation.

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