A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:

Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:


support the site

the complete review - fiction

A Labour of Moles

by
Ivan Vladislavić

general information | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B+ : clever little tale; a beautiful book(let)

See our review for fuller assessment.

The complete review's Review:

       A Labour of Moles is a quest tale of sorts -- philosophical sorts, among others: as the narrator notes at one point: "Dimly, I remembered a house in the suburbs, a seat in a bay window and a boy reading a book about the great philosophers of antiquity. How I wished now that I'd paid more attention".
       The narrator finds himself ... well, "in the thick of things" is how he puts it at the start of the story -- though he soon enough adds the more central question: "In the thick of what ?"
       "Let me ask the right questions", he reminds himself, but it's rather a difficult spot -- and, more generally, a somewhat confounding locale -- he finds himself in. It's a "broken world" -- though at least, he realizes, "an English world". Among the first characters he encounters is a murderer -- not an actual murderer, but rather: "the general idea" of 'murderer'. And slowly it begins to dawn on him: yes, this isn't the world as we know (and he once knew) it, but a rather more limited one of concepts and terms -- the pages of a dictionary or a similar well- (and alphabetically-)ordered reference work, with the narrator finding himself here among the Ms .....
       The narrator recalls that he used to be of the bookish sort, but that hasn't prepared him sufficiently for this particular bookish immersion. "Let me ask the right questions", he noted early on -- but it takes him a while to realize that "where I am" is not first and foremost what he should be puzzling over, since, after all, he ... isn't quite himself (or at least that former self he dimly recalls) in this very different world .....
       It's a clever little story, and quite nicely done. It's also beautifully presented in the Cahiers-series edition, with striking illustrations that take line drawings from an early twentieth century Bilderwörterbuch (a 'picture-dictionary') and cut, color, and collage them.

- M.A.Orthofer, 18 March 2012

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

• The Cahiers Series

• Official site
• Ivan Vladislavic at Blake Friedmann

• The Distance
• Double Negative
• The Folly
• The Loss Library
• 101 Detectives
• The Restless Supermarket

• See Index of books from and about Africa
• Other books in the Cahiers Series

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

       South African author Ivan Vladislavić was born in 1957.

- Return to top of the page -

© 2012-2021 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links