A book built from notes, encounters, overheard conversations, small violences, jokes, anxieties and architectural observations gathered while moving through Johannesburg in the late-apartheid and post-apartheid eras.

Vladislavić constructs the city through visions of security fences, street layouts, neighbours, electricity boxes, shopping centres, burglar alarms, swimming pools, rumours, weather, race, fear, aspiration and memory. The effect is cumulative and intimate, as though the city is revealing itself indirectly through its defensive reflexes.

Unlike most discourse, it does not flatten Johannesburg into either catastrophe or redemption. Vladislavić writes with enormous precision about paranoia, spatial fragmentation and urban inequality, but also humour, improvisation, texture and absurdity. One paragraph might move from discussions of private security and surveillance into reflections on gardening, public art or the emotional geometry of suburbs. It reads almost like a notebook kept by someone trying to map how a city thinks through infrastructure and habit rather than ideology alone. 

The book belongs in conversation with writers like W.G. Sebald, Teju Cole, Geoff Dyer or even Calvino’s Invisible Cities, though it remains intensely grounded in Johannesburg’s material reality. For readers interested in cities, postcolonial modernity, architecture, surveillance, race, memory or the emotional atmosphere of urban life, it’s exceptional. 

2009 W.W. Norton first American paperback edition, originally published in South Africa as Portrait with Keys: Joburg & What-What. Very good condition with light shelf wear to wraps and clean internal pages. Binding remains tight and square.