Travel:Shortly after I started my postgraduate year at Wits University in Johannesburg, I invited all my classmates to a house-warming party at my flat. Maybe 40 people in all. Five showed up. Later, I nonchalantly asked a classmate why he couldn't make it. "But your e-mail didn't say anything about security," he said.
(As it happened, security wasn't great: there was a succession of petty burglaries at the house - including the kidnapping and ransoming of my landlord's dog. These culminated, triumphantly, with the theft of the wheels from my car, while it was in the garage: the garage door didn't shut properly, and the thief slid in through the gap, raised the car on bricks, removed the wheels, and slid back out again with them.)
Had I read Ivan Vladislavic's account of his life in Johannesburg, Portrait with Keys, however, I would have been forewarned about the complexities of having a party in this city.
Organising a birthday party, he leaves the security arrangements until the last minute. It's too late to get the "armed response" people. All he can get is an unarmed trainee guard, a teenager who arrives with just half a uniform and, apparently, without having eaten properly in days. The kid stands in the rain, looking embarrassed. Vladislavic spends the party worrying about him, so much so that he eventually tells him to come and watch the cars from inside the garden. And then the guard's supervisor arrives, and gives out to both the guard and Vladislavic for being so slipshod. "This is a low point," Vladislavic reflects. Shamefacedly, he concludes: "No more parties. Never again."
Yet, by the time you reach this salutary tale, midway through the book, you know that even as he tells it, Vladislavic is delighting in the further revelation of his city's idiosyncrasies. This is a city that has fetishised the apparatuses of security, a city that has wreathed itself in razor wire, and Vladislavic writes of this obsession with wry detachment, like an amused anthropologist.
He and his friends have had their own run-ins with danger, but even these appear to stimulate his keen sense of the bizarre. A pal, Chas, interrupts a burglary at his home. The burglar rushes towards him, brandishing a knife. Chas falls over backwards, and lies there frozen as the burglar stoops over him, threatening. Then the burglar withdraws, climbing the garden wall. At the top, he pauses. He looks back at Chas, on the ground, and calls out: "What time is it?"
"Half past seven," Chas answers. The burglar gives a satisfied grunt, and jumps down into the street.
Later, in the garden, they find the massive monkey-wrench the burglar had used to break in. They decide to keep it: "Less as a trophy than a measure of everyday abnormality."
Such "everyday abnormality" is the essence of Vladislavic's sense of his city. This is a travel book, but of the best sort - one written by a native. He wanders around Johannesburg with a keen eye for the iconic, the lost, the left-behind. With gentle humour and unobtrusive poetry, he tells of the people he knows, the streets he walks, the changes he has witnessed.
Many of these people are white, and amongst them are those who are disenchanted with the new South Africa. People like the band I watched recently at an Afrikaner bar in Johannesburg called, euphemistically perhaps, Back 2 Basix. The lead singer introduced a song called Waiting for the Captain: it was set in Angola on the eve of independence, he explained, where an old Portuguese settler who had refused to abandon his land was awaiting the arrival of the local liberation army captain. When the captain arrived, the singer told us, he had the old man and his family executed.
The singer reckoned this was a good parable for the new South Africa. "We're hoping for peace," he told his audience, with a wry smile, "but we're waiting for the Captain."
Reflecting on the rate of shootings in the city, Vladislavic speculates that a fitting marker would be a map that recorded every violent death: "What a title deed to despair it would be, this map of the city of the dead." A friend disagrees with him: "Why not a map of the living?" she asks. "Why not a map showing every room, in every house, in every street of this bursting city, where a life began?"
Vladislavic shares one thing with the band Back 2 Basix - the sense of elegy for the disappearing city of "old" Johannesburg. But, following his friend's advice, he is also willing to celebrate the new city emerging around him. That peculiar tension, between despair and delight, animates this city. In Portrait with Keys, Vladislavic unlocks it beautifully.
Colin Murphy is a freelance journalist specialising in migration and development issues
Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked By Ivan Vladislavic Portobello Books, 199pp. £12.99