Written by a native of neighbouring Pretoria, this is a book about Johannesburg to which the author moved while still in his teens an embattled city, where he lives even now, coping with &ldquoeveryday abnormality&rdquo. Short, lyrical texts tautly bring together snapshots, events, meditations, all in first person the author&rsquos point of view. These pieces, thought-provoking, poetic at times, and often disturbing, apparently lack narrative cohesion but we soon realise how subtly they coalesce into a chilling portrait of an urban jungle driven by uncertainty, racism, random violence, hustle, theft, murder and the exigencies of hard-core survival. As the author asserts, this is &ldquoa frontier city, a place of contested boundaries. Territory must be secured and defended, or it will be lost. Today, the contest is fierce&hellip&rdquo One city is all the book&rsquos about, yet much travel does take place within its limits into memory, history, the arts, changing decades. By no means a grim book, there&rsquos humour here, irony, observation, pathos as well. And perhaps because it&rsquos only one city and its concrete streets (unyieldingly home to Vladislavic), he is able to dig deep, uncovering layers of palimpsest that lurk beneath.
Cyrus Mistry is a playwright and writer whose latest book is Chronicle of a Corpse Beater
