The Near North

The Near North is about the struggle of living in a decaying Johannesburg, and of the rituals that Vladislavić adopts to try and make sense of it. It’s also a beautiful and moving memorialising of a city that is always changing, often for the worse, but that for all its many faults, can still call itself one of the great cities of Africa. Walking around the city streets forces the author to encounter the physical scars of Joburg’s entropic descent into dysfunctionality, but also, in some measure, to understand it.