The Folly
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
‘YOU CAN’T RUSH THE BUILDING OF A NEW HOUSE. YOU’VE GOT TO GET THE WHOLE THING CLEAR IN THE MIND’S EYE.’
Mr and Mrs Malgas are going quietly about their lives when an eccentric squatter called Nieuwenhuizen arrives on the vacant plot next to their home and plans to build an elaborate mansion. Slowly, Father, as Nieuwenhuizen likes to be called, draws Mr Malgas into his grand scheme, while Mrs Malgas keeps an anxious watch from her lounge window.
When The Folly first appeared it was read as an evocative allegory on the rise and fall of apartheid. Twenty years on, this remarkably open text is sure to strike a new set of chords.
Grimly humorous and playfully serious, Ivan Vladislavić’s classic first novel is a comic and philosophical masterpiece.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An enigmatic newcomer to a South African veld endeavors to construct a mansion on an inherited plot of land and, in the process, pushes the sanity of his neighbors to its limit in this heady, lively, and darkly surreal novel by South African writer Vladislavic. Upon arriving in the small community, Nieuwenhuizen, as he's known, promptly invites the curiosity of his neighbors Mr. Malgas, a hardware store owner, and his wife, Mrs. Malgas by setting up camp on an untended acre behind their house. A neighborly overture by Mr. Malgas leads to a budding friendship between the two men, and in time, Mr. Malgas volunteers to help Nieuwenhuizen realize his home-building ambitions. Mrs. Malgas, who remains suspicious of Nieuwenhuizen, sees all too clearly that her husband is becoming a kind of servant to their new neighbor. In brief sections, we witness Mr. Malgas's growing obsession with, and increasingly humiliating submission to, Nieuwenhuizen. Mr. Malgas's inability to see that his new friend's house is a fiction or, conversely, our inability to see that it's real gives the story a dizzying effect. Vladislavic's cryptic, haunting tale echoes Jorge Luis Borges and David Lynch, drawing readers into its strange depths.
