Ivan VladislaviÄ‡,Sunandini Banerjee
Â â€œNot writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devilâ€™s own job.â€In this unusual text, a blend of essay, fiction, and literary genealogy, South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic explores the problems and potentials of the fictions he could not bring himself to write.Â Drawing from his notebooks of the past twenty years, Vladislavic records here a range of ideas for storiesâ€”unsettled accounts, he calls them, or case studies of failureâ€”and examines where they came from and why they eluded him. In the process, he reveals some of the principles that matter to him as a writer, and pays tribute to the writersâ€” such as Walser, Perec, Sterne, and DeLilloâ€”who have been important to him as both a reader and an author. At the heart of the text, like a brightly lit room in a field of debris, stands Vladislavicâ€™s Loss Library itself, the shelves laden with books that have never been written. On the page, Vladislavic tells us, every loss may yet be recovered.Â An extraordinary book about both the nature of novels and the process of writing, The Loss Library will appeal to anyone seeking to understand the almost magical and mythical experience of breathing life into a new work of fiction.Â Praise forÂ  VladislavicÂ â€œIn the tradition of Elias Canetti, a tour de force of the imagination.â€â€”AndrÃ© BrinkÂ â€œThe prose is stunning. It gives the impression of the words and the phrases having been caught from the insideâ€”as though the author lives on the other side of language, where every word is strange and dancing, and the way they are put together produces complicated patterned exchanges like minuets.â€â€”Tony MorphetÂ Â 
Southern Africa,South Africa,Writing,Essays,Short Stories,Fiction,Language,Writing,Literature,African Literature,Cultural,Africa
The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories