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    The Folly
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    The Folly
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    The Folly
    Ebook174 pages2 hours

    The Folly

    By Ivan Vladislavic

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Mr and Mrs Malgas are going quietly about their lives when a mysterious squatter appears on the vacant plot next to their home. Arriving with portmanteau in hand and a head full of extraordinary ideas, the stranger at once begins to fashion tools and cutlery from old iron and rubbish. Soon he enlists Mr Malgas’s help: drawn in by the stranger's conviction, Mr Malgas clears the land, all the while struggling to catch sight of the grand mansion that is supposedly springing up around them. His vision, however, continues to fail him - until, one day, it doesn't.
    When The Folly appeared in South Africa in 1993, with its story of the seductive and dangerous illusions language can breed, it was read as an evocative allegory of the rise and fall of apartheid. Vladislavić’s remarkable first novel is sure to strike new chords for contemporary readers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnd Other Stories
    Release dateNov 11, 2015
    ISBN9781908276711
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The Folly

    4/5

    14 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The writing was exquisite and the characters (particularly Mr. and Mrs.) were well-developed and complex, I was able to care for them a great deal. The style is not one I enjoy reading as it's surreal and Gabriel Garcia Marquez-like. However, I could appreciate the author's eye for detail and imagination.
    • 4/5
      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.