One evening a man carrying a fake leather portmanteau gets out of a taxi in front of a vacant lot next to the Malgas′ home. He is odd, scurrying around the lot picking up trash and making things out of it, camping in the corner by the hedges, and never seeming to leave. Mrs. Malgas is suspicious and keeps an eye on him out the window and wonders if she should call the police. Mr. Malgas, however, is intrigued and soon approaches him. The man introduces himself as ″Father,″ although later he says his name is Nieuwenhuizen. He is there to take ownership of the lot and build a house. Mr. Malgas is excited at the prospect and offers to help. As time goes by, and the plans for the house never materialize, Mr. Malgas must imagine the house in order to remain friends with his neighbor. As the imaginary house becomes more real, Mr. Malgas begins to become less so.

Parable, fable, allegory? It′s hard to say exactly what this book is, but it is well-written and funny, with thought-provoking threads. But like the strings outlining the foundation of the planned house, they seem to meander into a tangled dead-end heap. I was following a line I thought was a religious allegory, but in the end was left staring at an amorphous cat′s cradle. Was Father God and Malgas his disciple? Were they building His church not on a rock, but an anthill? Or was this a cautionary tale about totalitarian state plans, being forced to ″see″ what you are told to, and then being left with nothing when the plan changes? The genius in this book lies not in what is written, but in what must be conjectured. Do we as readers buy into the premise, or do we remain with Mrs. Malgas on the outside looking in?

The writing is very clever and humorous. Things are described like punctuation marks, lists of objects reflect personality, and words beginning with C seem to be important, but are they? The first sentence and the last are nearly the same; what do the differences mean? I would love to be reading this with others, as the possibilities for discussion are endless. Recommended for those who liked [The Investigation] by Philippe Claudel or perhaps Paul Auster′s [Travels in the Scriptorium]. ( )

I'm a diehard Southerner, but if I ever considered moving to New York, the only reason would be to live near the offices of Archipelago Books. This publisher has an unerring eye for the best in international fiction, whether in translation or written originally in English. The Folly, written by South African Ivan Vladislavić, falls into the latter category, and it is absolutely sublime.

The easiest thing for me would be to simply appropriate Audrey Schoeman's Goodreads review. Like her, I filled my reading journal with so many beautiful passages that I might as well have copied the entire book. As Audrey observes, Vladislavić is a master of poetic prose, particularly in his description of everyday things, whether the "socks rolled into balls and swallowing their own toes" or Mr. Malgas's beloved overalls:

"Each job had left a blemish on the cloth - a birthmark of enamel paint, a festering oil-stain, sutured cuts and tears, scabs of wood glue and Polyfilla."

Vladislavić tells us that for Mrs. Malgas, "[j]ust to look at them gave her pins and needles in her hands"; just to read about them gives me pins and needles in my soul.

None of the other Goodreads reviewers, however, has pointed out two other things about this book which intrigued me. First was the title, which alludes to both meanings of the word "folly." Its primary definition is lack of good sense or foolishness, and that is clearly how Mrs. Malgas views her husband's efforts to assist Nieuwenhuizen in building his new house. However, a folly can also be an ornamental (and usually costly) edifice with no practical purpose; while Nieuwenhuizen's house is not costly, being constructed (to the extent it exists at all) from salvaged and repurposed materials, it certainly lacks any practical purpose because it is merely a figment of the men's imaginations. I don't know enough about South Africa, during or after apartheid, to recognize whether the idea of an architectural folly has political significance, either on its own or as compared with other cultures in which such buildings are typically found, but one of the joys of The Folly, and Archipelago's other titles, is that I want to dig deeper to find out.

My second observation involves Vladislavić's use of terms which seem to have Christian significance. I read an ARC, so it's entirely possible that this was a typographical anomaly corrected before publication, but almost immediately after Mr (as the spouses refer to each other) starts actively working on Nieuwenhuizen's plot, Mrs starts referring to Nieuwenhuizen as "Him": "'Typical,' she sniffed. "You’ll give Him the shirt off your back, although you don’t know Him from Adam, while your own family goes hungry." Christians use such capitalization when referring to Jesus; is Vladislavić suggesting that Nieuwenhuizen is some type of Christ figure? Similarly, when Mr picks up the unusually long nails (spikes, as in the Crucifixion?) Nieuwenhuizen has requested, they are packaged in two boxes of a gross each, with the remaining dozen wrapped separately: "the surplus dozen - the Twelve, as he thought of them." The Twelve traditionally refers to the twelve apostles; is Mr drawing a parallel here between the nails and the apostles and, if so, what does he mean?

Regardless of the answers to these questions (if there even are any), The Folly is a language lover's dream, and the cover design selected by Archipelago is exquisite as well. I highly recommend The Folly.

I received a free copy of The Folly through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )