101 Detectives

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Michael Titlestad for inviting me to take part as a panelist in the Africa Week book launch of 101 Detectives, which was hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand on 21st May 2015, and where I presented an early version of this review.

Notes

1 The ‘d’ in the words ‘Detective’ and ‘Detection’ is capitalized throughout. I have decided to retain the capitalization of the ‘d’ in the latter word as I feel it works to satirize the activity of Detection by laughably inflating its importance as a mechanism that augurs discovery and closure.

2 In recent years, Vladislavić has been celebrated for his literary work set in Johannesburg, which should by no means overshadow the finesse with which he writes about both real and speculative elsewheres.

3 In portrait 4, Vlad, the narrator, is tripped on the street by a piece of packaging, ‘a Möbius strip’. This unfortunate accident ties in with a writerly interest in falling and tripping that re-appears in later sketches in the creative non-fictional text. In portrait 67, the author- narrator writes about the friendship between Elias Canetti and Thomas Marek. Marek, who was paralysed, was fascinated by the act of falling. Canetti, to amuse him, would trip in his presence and eventually became so skilled at falling, that Marek urged him to write an essay on the subject, called ‘The Art of Falling’. The narrator wishes that Canetti had written this essay as he ‘would like to read it’ (p. 93). One can assume that ‘Exit Strategy’ is Vladislavić’s riposte in this extended literary conversation.