Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
Weblink
http://ivanvladislavic.com

THE FOLLY

Ivan Vladislavic

Grimly humorous and playfully serious, Ivan Vladislavic's classic first novel is a comic and philosophical masterpiece.

You can't rush the building of a new house. You've got to get the whole thing clear in the mind's eye.' Mr and Mrs Malgas are going quietly about their lives when an eccentric squatter called Nieuwenhuizen arrives on the vacant plot next to their home and plans to build an elaborate mansion. Slowly, Father, as Nieuwenhuizen prefers to be called, draws Mr Malgas into his grand scheme, while Mrs Malgas keeps an anxious watch from her lounge window. When THE FOLLY first appeared it was read as an evocative allegory on the rise and fall of apartheid. Twenty years on, this remarkably open text is sure to strike a new set of chords.

Available products
Book Published 1994-08-01 by Serif

Comments

"The Folly, by Ivan Vladislavic, was wonderful. It's a political allegory (or parable? or something in between?) that must have been amazing to read in the context of emerging democratic South Africa in 1993 but has lost none of its power over the years." Audrey Schoeman, The Guardian

"One of South Africa's most finely tuned observers." Ted Hodgkinson, The Times Literary Supplement

"In the tradition of Elias Canetti, a tour de force of the imagination." - André Brink

Archipelago

"Vladislavic is a rare, brilliant writer. His work eschews all cant. Its sheer verve, the way it burrows beneath ossified forms of writing, its discipline and the distance it places between itself and the jaded preoccupations of local fiction, distinguish it."

"Vladislavic's strength lies in translating a place, one that is as recognizable as anything in our everyday lives but that reveals truths that have been standing in front of us the whole time." Justin Alvarez, The Paris Review

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