Labour of Moles by Ivan Vladislavic

You all should have a look at Cahier 17—A Labour of Moles—which sounds pretty crazy. I’m quoting this bit from an essay on Vladislavic that will appear in the next Quarterly Conversaiton. It seems Labour is narrated by a word in the dictionary (!).

For those of us following Vladislavić’s work, 2011 was a good year. It saw the release of three new works. The first is a collection of lost, abandoned, incomplete and incomplete-able stories, together with reflections on their failure to come into print, sandwiched around a central story that gives the collection its title—The Loss Library. The second is a fable, or a riddle, written from the phenomenological perspective of a character who is a word (but which word?) in a dictionary, published alongside 19 spectacular color illustrations in Sylph Editions’ Cahier series under the title, A Labour of Moles. And, of course, the third is Double Negative, a novel. Since the last novel with a continuous story by Vladislavić was his second—the 2001 masterpiece, The Restless Supermarket, the story of a retired proofreader setting about to “correct” the bewildering and rapidly changing world of post-Apartheid Johannesburg, written in a form that contains its own telling “errors”—readers were especially excited about Double Negative. It was worth the wait.

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