Description
Book Synopsis“Surely one of the most ingenious love letters—full of violence, fear, humour, and cunning—ever addressed to a city.” —Geoff Dyer
Trade Review"
Portrait with Keys is a beautiful book, affecting and ingenious, opening new intellectual vistas onto art and architecture, poetry and urbanism." -- Ian Volner - Bookforum
"Like the city it studies,
Portrait with Keys is complex, with vast rewards for the patient reader." -- Tracey D. Samuelson - Christian Science Monitor
"A wonderful book about Johannesburg....This is a love letter to Johannesburg and a truly marvelous piece of work. I read it and was deeply moved." -- Justin Cartwright - Literary Review
"A rare, brilliant writer. His work eschews all cant. Its sheer verve, the way it burrows beneath ossified forms of writing, its discipline and the distance it places between itself and the jaded preoccupations of local fiction, distinguish it." -- Sunday Times [London]
"Freshly engaging, with its wry take on security and a homeless underclass that stashes its winter wardrobe in manholes beneath Africa’s richest city." -- Maya Jaggi - The Guardian
"A passionate account by a man who loves his city, shocking because it so embraces the things most people try to avoid thinking about." -- The Independent [UK]
"Reminds me sometimes of Orhan Pamuk’s
Istanbul and sometimes of James Joyce’s
Dubliners, but it is altogether one of a kind. . . . He leaves his readers consoled by the feeling that art and goodness alike can be impervious to squalor." -- Jan Morris
