The Imaginator: Perspective and Possibility in Ivan Vladislavić’s “The Tuba”

Abstract

Ivan Vladislavić's fiction often centres on how characters relate to their environments and, more particularly, on how they perceive cultural artefacts, such as monuments, statues, fine-art objects and architecture. He describes the visual aspects of these artefacts in minute detail. Such artefacts frequently serve as motifs in his short stories and novels, and he regularly employs them as markers of ideology and of change. As the author of several texts on South African fine arts, this preoccupation with the visual comes as no surprise