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Double Negative

door Ivan Vladislavić

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764349,016 (4.08)11
"One of the most imaginative minds at work in South African literature today."--André Brink Originally part of a collaborative project with photographer David Goldblatt,Double Negative is a subtle triptych that captures the ordinary life of Neville Lister during South Africa's extraordinary revolution. Ivan Vladislavic lays moments side by side like photographs on a table. He lucidly portrays a city and its many lives through reflections on memory, art, and what we should really be seeking. Ivan Vladislavic is the author of a number of prize-winning fiction and nonfiction books. He currently lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.… (meer)
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This was another great suggestion from Norwich Writer’s Centre summer reading adventure. More details of the summer reads are at http://www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk/yoursummerreads.aspx.

Double Negative is published by And Other Stories, an alternative UK publisher that brings “collaborative, imaginative and shamelessly literary” works to the fore with their annual subscription package. Join the mailing list at: andotherstories.org/join-us. Follow on twitter @andothertweets, and join on Facebook: And Other Stories. Check out their website: http://www.andotherstories.org/

Our main protagonist Neville is a young white man, a university drop out, back home living in his parents house in Johannesburg. He seems to have lost his way and is painting lines and arrows in parking lots with fellow worker Jaco. On the surface Jaco may seem okay but don’t be deceived by impressions. “Jaco was like a can that had been shaken, for all his jokey patter, he was full of dangerous energies, and if you prodded him in the wrong place, he would go off pop.” The era is pre apartheid, Neville doesn’t like to get too involved, he prefers to stand on the periphery watching events unfold, a wavering character. Though he does take exception to his father’s new neighbour’s out and out racism. “An odourless poison leaked out of him.” “His prejudice was a passion.” His father fears that he will fall in with the wrong crowd. Neville has no idea what he wants to do with his life so his father introduces him to a family friend, a famous photographer Saul Auerbach who takes Neville out for the day with a British journalist, Brookes who is looking for a pre-apartheid story. Spending a day with Auerbach changes Neville’s life. He is encouraged to play a game of chance as they stand on top of a hill. Each choose a house to visit at random not knowing who lives inside or what they may find. For me, the story really grasped my attention at this point. They only get to see two of the houses. Neville’s choice is abandoned due to poor light. Auerbach’s portraits of the first two become celebrated pieces.

Nev is awakened by the experience, now it is as if he is seeing life through a camera lense. The narrative moves swiftly on, giving us snapshots of South Africa during this period of tumultuous change. Nevillle struggles with the concept of duty but takes the easy way out and moves to London to avoid military service. His day with Auerbach made such an lasting impact on him that he becomes a photographer. But he misses his home in South Africa and longs to return.”The poetry of the moment made me long for the prose of Johannesburg. I went to see a travel agent.” An old lady had thrown chicken feed into the ballot box! He returns to post apartheid Johannesburg but much has changed. His former home seems alien to him. Now Neville is a fairly successful photographer being interviewed by Janie, a blogger. He thinks about the day spent with Auerbach often. He has not forgotten his choice of house, and he decides to visit decades later. Behind every front door there is a story to be told and each story is so different. Each photograph can be so different from the next. The possibilities are endless.

Double Negative spans decades in time. It handles these changes well. I particularly liked Nev’s quote: “I’m growing into my father’s language: it will fit me eventually like his old overcoat that was once two sizes too big.”

Double Negative is exceptionally well written. It captures an everyday life against the backdrop of South Africa’s incredible revolution in an engaging portrait of a city and its many diverse citizens. I loved the link with photography, and the whole idea of the Double Negative. The following quote is taken from a later section in the novel when a mature Nev is talking to his wife Leora.

“She was being ironic, obviously,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And so are you.”

“I guess.”

“The whole thing is ironic.”

“Including the ironies.”

“Maybe they cancel one another out then,” Leora said, “Like a double negative.”

Highly recommended.

My full review is at www.kyrosmagica.wordpress.com ( )
  marjorie.mallon | Mar 27, 2019 |
I had started this book before reading Runner, which took only two plus days. Not that I wasn't enjoying this one, but I was donating platelets and took Runner with me, because I thought it would require less focus and this book seemed like it would be difficult to read with only one hand to manipulate it.
The book action takes place mostly in Johannesburg South Africa, before and after the end of apartheid. The writer is a young college dropout when the book opens. He father is concerned that he is drifting and not applying himself appropriately, so he arranges for him to spend some time with a well known artistic photographer, as he goes about Johannesburg taking photos.
The writing is high quality. Consider this example from the end of the first part of the book, “Young people learn things intensely. They're impressionable, we say. The proper image is not a tabula rasa, we are not written upon or etched or branded, but moulded from a substance already dense with thought and feeling. Our teachers reach into us, skilfully or clumsily, it's the luck of the draw, and shape this substance, they make ridges there, hollows and curves, and perception runs over them, bending to the contours, breaking against the sharp edges repeatedly, until they are as familiar as the roof of your mouth to your tongue. Experience swirls through these channels like water over rock, being shaped in turn and given a new direction. The day had diverted a current in me, but I could neither express this change nor predict its issue.”
(After reading this passage I ran my tongue against the roof of my mouth.) ( )
  BillPilgrim | May 17, 2014 |
Double negatives confuse. In English they usually cancel each other out, while at the same time slightly tilting the meaning from a straightforward declarative sentence. Contrast "She wasn't unattractive" with "She was attractive" and you will get two different takes. However, there is no standard way of interpreting them as sometimes double negatives can be used for emphasis, iterating the negation, as in the famous "I can't get no satisfaction".

Double negatives in photography go even further. They don't just confuse, they obscure. What is the real image? What is hidden? Ivan Vladislavić's novel looks at shifts in meaning over time through the eyes of two photographers and a more contemporary counterpart.

In the 1980s, Neville Lister dropped out of university after two years. Nev lived in South Africa though, and dropping out was a fast entrée to military service. Young Neville was not too sure about the real world. He recognized things were wrong, adopting some of the language of liberation -- "I may have mentioned Frelimo"-- but is not quite prepared to storm the barricades.


The world beyond the university, where the real politicians operated rather than the student replicas, was a mystery to me. Realpolitik. The new term with its foreign accent clarified nothing. People I knew on campus, writers on the student paper, the members of theatre companies and vegetable co-ops, were finding their way into the Movement, as they called it, but I had no idea how to seek out such a path, and no inclination either, to be honest. The Movement. It sounded like a machine, not quite a juggernaut but a piece of earthmoving equipment for running down anyone who stood in the way, crushing the obstacles pragmatically into the churned-up demolition site of history. Construction site, they would have insisted.


While Neville worked as a road painter's assistant, a black person's job, his father tried to get him to consider his future. One day Neville found himself riding along with a family friend to find out about less traditional fields of work. Saul Auerbach was a photographer. Riding with them was Auerbach's friend, an English journalist visiting Johannesburg to discover the "real" story. High above the city, the trio looked down and each selected a house to visit for subject matter. They went to the house selected by the photographer and the one selected by the journalist. Each time Neville was amazed at how Auerbach could talk himself into the house, past the sceptical residents to find his material. Auerbach's photographs were reminiscent of Walker Evans, capturing the essence of his subjects and their lives, and freezing it forever. The pictures he took that day would become classics. When it was time to visit the house Neville had selected, the others had lost interest and without discussion they went their separate ways.

Like many others of his class, Neville avoided national service by heading off to London. Never quite adjusting, never fitting in, he felt rootless. He followed events back home with an odd sense of detachment, viewing at a remove. After the fall of apartheid and the election of Mandela, he went home. The London period is somewhat obscure. Neville deliberately glosses over it in his narrative. He reestablished himself in Johannesburg, but his story skips to 2009, leaving the interval blank.

Now an established commercial photographer, we see him being interview for a news blog, asked to reveal himself to a digital world by a young woman who seems completely alien. She clicks images of his photographs -- "Do you mind?"-- to send out into the ether. Nothing quite shows so painfully the difference between late middle age and early adulthood as this interview, as the young woman deftly works her electronic devices, gestures and chatters, as Neville, now feeling like Auerbach must have with him, tries to explain still photography; the search for composition, the wait for the light, the development of the image. She delivered her own pronouncement on Auerbach's work, unknowingly trivializing it and questioning its veracity:


' "Photograph" is such a heavy word... Even"photo" is dull. You can hear the bell tolling. Phoh!-toh! We should find some other word. Have you noticed how Auerbach always says "photograph"as if he needs to give the thing its full, awful weight. It suits his work too. Those people of his standing around in their gloomy houses like pieces of furniture, holding up their faces like signboards, like beggars at robots. No job, three kids, please help. ... I can hardly bear to look at his early stuff. It makes me feel claustrophobic like I've been locked up in a museum nobody visits anymore.'

'It was a different time you know. You're probably too young to remember.'

'Ja, but I don't believe it was all so gloomy.'

'It was horrible! Every day of their lives ordinary people were subjected to appalling abuse. This was a police state'...

'You had to be there' Janie said with a laugh.

Three generations, three ways of seeing the world, layers to sift through, with the occasional lacuna. How are things viewed? Moving from the black and white of apartheid and Auerbach's photographs to the whiz bang colourful bombardment of today's world seems like a cataclysm, a kaleidoscope of shifts. These are the heart of Vladislavić's work.
3 stem SassyLassy | Jan 23, 2014 |
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"One of the most imaginative minds at work in South African literature today."--André Brink Originally part of a collaborative project with photographer David Goldblatt,Double Negative is a subtle triptych that captures the ordinary life of Neville Lister during South Africa's extraordinary revolution. Ivan Vladislavic lays moments side by side like photographs on a table. He lucidly portrays a city and its many lives through reflections on memory, art, and what we should really be seeking. Ivan Vladislavic is the author of a number of prize-winning fiction and nonfiction books. He currently lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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