A review by avmash
The Folly, by Ivan Vladislavić
5.0
Twelve hours after I first picked up The Folly, I was bouncing on the bed next to my ever-patient husband. ‘Do you want to know what my favourite sentence is?’
The look on his face said that he didn’t, but he heard it anyway. I’d copied so many beautiful strings of words into my notebook that I had to share them. Instead of retyping them all here, let me just strongly suggest that you read the book.
I’ll admit to not knowing what to expect when I picked the book up. It’s a South African novel, first published in 1993, so politics, probably? But while The Folly can certainly be read as a political allegory, the story is a universal one, not reliant on the South African backdrop for its appeal. Its premise is simple. A stranger (Nieuwenhuizen, or ‘new house’ in Afrikaans) settles on a vacant lot with a plan to build a house. Next door live a middle aged couple, Mr and Mrs Malgas, who become fascinated by his presence; Mr (they refer to each other by title alone) is intrigued by the possibilities and Mrs repulsed by the disturbance to their lives. The house – the folly – ends up being constructed only in the minds of the men, and ultimately the whole fantastic edifice will collapse around them.
So yes, this can be read as an allegory to apartheid, that towering structure of legalized discrimination which was toppling as the book was written. More than that, it can be seen as scathing indictment of any of the political or personal fantasies we erect to feed our own importance, and one that feels just as relevant today as it must have twenty years ago.
Vladislavic has a mastery of language. He plays with sounds, often using alliteration and assonance to bring poetry into his writing and to turn conversation into a balloon, passed back and forth between the participants. One night we are told that the two men’s conversation moved from hardware to ‘wallpaper, sandpaper, zinc, sink, sank, surfaced again into the niceties of skinning a cat, dropped off, slid in slow motion through spec housing […] found themselves talking about the weather’. On another day, as they battle the earth, sketching out the plan with nails, the verbs become military: ‘soldiered’, ‘discharged’, ‘reloaded’, ‘broached’. There is no lazy writing here; each word has been carefully selected to serve its purpose.
Things, people’s relationships to them, and they way that they are used to give a sense of safety and belonging are crucial to the novel. All of the characters at one point or another make lists and use them to assert their dominance over the world around them. Mrs. Malgas’ character is perfectly conveyed when, overwhelmed by the strangeness of events, she turns to her ‘prize knick-knack cabinet’ for relief. ‘In the end it was a glass paperweight with a guinea fowl aflutter in its heart that spoke to her’.
The three characters in the novel each have their role to play in the broader allegorical purpose of the book, but Mr and Mrs Malgas are also at heart believable characters; she who never leaves the home and is obsessed with order and things remaining the same, he full of admiration for this stranger who can build his own dream. Nieuwenhuizen remains more elusive, never quite of this world.
At the end of the day this was a fantastic read. I loved the way Vladislavic plays with language; I loved the timeless nature of the story, and I loved the commentary on both South African politics and the broader world. There’s a lot to unpack here, and a lot of depth that I’ve not touched on here. I’m looking forward to coming back to this, and also to exploring more Vladislavic as I believe some of the themes recur in his later work.
The look on his face said that he didn’t, but he heard it anyway. I’d copied so many beautiful strings of words into my notebook that I had to share them. Instead of retyping them all here, let me just strongly suggest that you read the book.
I’ll admit to not knowing what to expect when I picked the book up. It’s a South African novel, first published in 1993, so politics, probably? But while The Folly can certainly be read as a political allegory, the story is a universal one, not reliant on the South African backdrop for its appeal. Its premise is simple. A stranger (Nieuwenhuizen, or ‘new house’ in Afrikaans) settles on a vacant lot with a plan to build a house. Next door live a middle aged couple, Mr and Mrs Malgas, who become fascinated by his presence; Mr (they refer to each other by title alone) is intrigued by the possibilities and Mrs repulsed by the disturbance to their lives. The house – the folly – ends up being constructed only in the minds of the men, and ultimately the whole fantastic edifice will collapse around them.
So yes, this can be read as an allegory to apartheid, that towering structure of legalized discrimination which was toppling as the book was written. More than that, it can be seen as scathing indictment of any of the political or personal fantasies we erect to feed our own importance, and one that feels just as relevant today as it must have twenty years ago.
Vladislavic has a mastery of language. He plays with sounds, often using alliteration and assonance to bring poetry into his writing and to turn conversation into a balloon, passed back and forth between the participants. One night we are told that the two men’s conversation moved from hardware to ‘wallpaper, sandpaper, zinc, sink, sank, surfaced again into the niceties of skinning a cat, dropped off, slid in slow motion through spec housing […] found themselves talking about the weather’. On another day, as they battle the earth, sketching out the plan with nails, the verbs become military: ‘soldiered’, ‘discharged’, ‘reloaded’, ‘broached’. There is no lazy writing here; each word has been carefully selected to serve its purpose.
Things, people’s relationships to them, and they way that they are used to give a sense of safety and belonging are crucial to the novel. All of the characters at one point or another make lists and use them to assert their dominance over the world around them. Mrs. Malgas’ character is perfectly conveyed when, overwhelmed by the strangeness of events, she turns to her ‘prize knick-knack cabinet’ for relief. ‘In the end it was a glass paperweight with a guinea fowl aflutter in its heart that spoke to her’.
The three characters in the novel each have their role to play in the broader allegorical purpose of the book, but Mr and Mrs Malgas are also at heart believable characters; she who never leaves the home and is obsessed with order and things remaining the same, he full of admiration for this stranger who can build his own dream. Nieuwenhuizen remains more elusive, never quite of this world.
At the end of the day this was a fantastic read. I loved the way Vladislavic plays with language; I loved the timeless nature of the story, and I loved the commentary on both South African politics and the broader world. There’s a lot to unpack here, and a lot of depth that I’ve not touched on here. I’m looking forward to coming back to this, and also to exploring more Vladislavic as I believe some of the themes recur in his later work.