According to the dictionary, an exploded view is an illustration or diagram of a construction that shows its parts separately but in positions that indicate their proper relationships to the whole. It's the perfect title for this short novel in that it is comprised of four stories that illustrate components of South African society close up and in relation to each other. It begins with a census taker who is gathering input on a new batch of demographic questions. He is a person who thinks in statistics and is able to view his own actions from a remove. He becomes infatuated with a woman who lives in Villa Toscana, a faux Italian enclave, down the highway from a new housing project.

A sanitation engineer who is working on the new housing project has been invited to dinner by his boss. He worries about whether to bring a gift, what to wear, and is surprised to find two community liaisons and an unintroduced man at the dinner as well. He is the only white person at the table, and when the conversation lapses into Sotho and Zulu he is left out, leaving him to wonder if there is more going on than meets the eye.

He could already see himself looking back on it {the dinner}, from a tremendous distance, and understanding, at last, what it was all about. He wished he was there now, at that reassuring remove, on a height, filled with the wisdom of hindsight.

The restaurant where they are eating is decorated with dozens of African masks, the work of the artist S. Majara, who is hosting a party after the closing of his show called Curiouser or curio user. He had bought several cartons of masks, probably stolen, and repurposed them for his art. One party goer challenges him that the Africans who made the masks were paid peanuts, yet he is being paid outrageous sums for his art.

'...But I can't help being aware of the balance of power, the imbalance, one should say. The way you live here, the way the people who made these masks live.'

'And you, poor thing, sleeping on a bench at the station.'

'Oh, I'm talking about myself too, you mustn't take it personally. It's just a question of awareness, of being conscious and staying conscious of how things are, even if you can't change them. Especially then.'

Later, the artist thinks,

Where had Leon picked up this girl Amy? He knew the type. They drove to their televised protests in their snappy little cars, they took their djembe drums on board as hand luggage, they gazed upon exploitation and oppression through their Police sunglasses. And all along they demonstrated that there was nothing to be done. Their radicalism consisted in making manifest the impossibility of change.

Our fourth and final protagonist runs a business putting up billboards. He's on his way home from installing one in the new housing project, when he realizes that he's forgotten his phone, probably dropped at the work site. He turns back and meets the minibus that the census taker had passed in the first story.

The interconnectedness of these seemingly random strangers is similar to the way components of an exploded view seem complete unto themselves, but are parts of a larger whole. Race, class, and education level seem to divide these characters, yet they are entwined in a larger, complicated societal whole. Although the story is set post-apartheid, racism and de facto segregation are realities acknowledged by everyone. Although all the characters are besmirched by the system, I found myself drawn to them and their petty struggles. Although not a cheerful book, I was comforted by the common humanness of their situations.

This is the second book by Vladislavić that I've read, and it's very different from [The Folly], which has a fantastical or allegorical element. But I found both books thought-provoking and well-written, and although I finished both with more questions than answers, I enjoyed pondering those questions. ( )

Ooh, it made me heart sad, The Exploded View. It's overwhelmingly beautiful, but absolutely sad (exception of first story about a Nice Guy™, which almost every woman in the world knows means he's really a creep, although I guess while it fails the beautiful moniker, it's still sad, since I'm sure if you asked creepy dude, he'd say he's in love, not creepy at all.) And beautiful is wrong too -- it isn't vistas and sunsets, but beautiful in some other, intangible way that writing sometimes is when it's describing sadness and potential and how we fail each other. The stories are all loosely tied together via a housing estate in South Africa (and by loose, I mean loose. Sometimes the tie is that the housing estate is off in the distance). And it ends with the looming threat of death, and the stories hang over you like that, days (months -- I am so far behind in reviews) later. Death is overhanging me.

The Exploded View by Ivan Vladislavić went on sale March 28, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )

Vladislavic was recommended to me by some literary critics in South Africa, who are fed up with Coetzee because he is taken to represent their national situation. In their view, Coetzee's sense of politics is simple-minded to the point of absurdity, and unhelpfully mythologizing ("Waiting for the Babrarians"), while his sense of place is abstract to the point of universality (where, exactly, does "Despair" or "Diary of a Bad Year" take place?). Personally, I had never read Coetzee as a way to learn about South Africa, but I can easily see the frustration among South African readers when he is taken by so many people around the world as an emblem of what South Africa is. As one person said, he's a salve for the consciences of many readers.

Vladislavic is a tremendous antidote. There's a small similarity between "The Exploded View" and Roddy Doyle's early work: in both cases, the subject is the forgotten parts of the country, where dirt, corruption, kinds of poverty, and general confusion mix with kitsch, regional capitalism, and camp. "The Exploded View" is about those stretches of the freeway in South Africa where townships sit beside new housing estates. It's an excellent verbal portrait of that new sort of landscape outside of suburbia and slums.

As with Coetzee, it's also possible to read Vladislavic just as a writer, instead of as a way of finding out about South Africa. (Even though he occasionally makes that difficult by putting census facts and figures in his characters' mouths. telling us, for example, that one two percent of white South Africans speak an African language.) In terms of writing, his descriptions are often wonderful, although he does rely a great deal on similes, and he does tend to write brief, imagistic similes, one per clause or one per sentence. There are some passages in which images merge rather than accumulating, but they are in the minority. His similes are inventive and sharp enough to sustain the writing—but it also feels as if the writing needs sustaining, as if it would sink down into ordinary prose if it weren't buoyed by metaphors. The tropes are like little gulps of air: they make the surrounding writing appear inert. What are the limitations of such a style, where description happens in iterated units, and is almost exclusively metaphoric, visual, and deictic?

There's also the issue of realism, and Vladislavic's distance from his raw material. Occasionally his similes are based on observations that appear to have been made minutes before he took notes on them. It's hard not to imagine him walking and driving through the housing estates, townships, and highways, and jotting things down in a notebook. Those passages are distracting, and it would have been better if he'd modified and integrated them into material he'd invented later on. But he's an excellent writer, and I'm going to read another book of his soon. ( )

Not his best work, but still an insightful glimpse at Joburg life. ( )