I stand alongside Johannesburg’s foremost chronicler, under a summer sun so harsh that even the cicadas are silenced, and watch as a man with a backwards ball cap breaks into my car. Ivan Vladislavi? and I are slack with awe, children observing a birthday party magician. We cannot ignore the irony: Vladislavi? is this contested city’s literary break and enter specialist, who in his masterly work of non-fiction Portrait with Keys documented how the citizens of Johannesburg invade one another’s lives with all manner of prestidigitation, vehicular or otherwise. Two loud clicks, and the ball cap man has opened the passenger side door. He reaches for the ignition, frees the keys I’d left there half an hour earlier, and takes my money. At no point in the procedure does he ask me whether the car is mine.

Inside Vladislavi?’s home, which smells of polished wood and books, I note that embedded into the architecture of Portrait with Keys — 138 thematically linked segments detailing the author’s meanderings in and around his neighbourhood — is the tragedy of postmodern Johannesburg, a place where everything is locked up, bricked up, walled off, shuttered. This is a city, Portrait suggests, that can only be rendered in fragments, mostly because it was built to be broken. Sixteen years after the demise of apartheid, it is still the perfect articulation of that regime’s ethos: you on one side, me on the other.

“Fragments neither close nor open meaning: they may mean anything except wholeness, except certainty,” wrote Vladislavi?’s mentor, the late poet Lionel Abrahams. They are a Johannesburg manifesto, these words. But the future arrives this summer (winter, if you happen to be South African) in the form of the fifa World Cup Finals, not merely a soccer tournament but a multibillion-dollar piece of economic and infrastructural machinery. The high-speed, high-tech Gautrain will link southern Soweto, the once infamous township and hotbed of anti-apartheid resistance, with northern Sandton, the privately guarded sanctuary of the white and black hyper-elite. This is urban planning as politics as cultural reboot, the knitting together of communities that were built to be apart. And one wonders whether Johannesburg’s writers, long-time detailers of division, can help undo the work of apartheid’s engineers and contribute to a notion of collective belonging: to wholeness, to certainty.

We sit at a rustic dining table, Vladislavi? and I, my newly recovered keys between us like a talisman. “I’ve always had an interest in how Johannesburg changes,” he tells me, “but in the ’90s my thinking started to shift slightly, and I became interested in how the city reflects South African society’s evolution.” He is, of course, referring to the tumultuous decade that followed the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990: an era of delirious optimism, low-level civil war, and a crime wave so brutal that it brought into question the prevailing theories of human nature, already under review thanks to apartheid. Everything changed. No position on the social, cultural, or moral compass was fixed.

Yet Johannesburg — frontier city, mining town — has shape-shifted continuously since it leaped, fully formed, from an impossibly rich vein of gold in 1886. The city went up (by 1897, it was the wealthiest and most industrialized in Africa), and the city went down: the razing of Brickfields slum in 1904, the destruction of the informal black settlement Sophiatown in the 1950s, the steady erasure of the mine dumps that mark the city like tribal scars. Things are built on top of things, millennia of human history précised in 130 years of expert bulldozing. “All gone into the unremembering dust,” wrote Herman Charles Bosman, Joburg’s first great chronicler. “There is no other city in the world that is so anxious to shake off the memories of its early origins.”

Bosman begat Lionel Abrahams, who in turn begat Vladislavi?; they are figures on a Johannesburg literary continuum. Flâneurs all (and this despite Abrahams being wheelchair bound), they have engaged in what philosopher Michel de Certeau called “the long poem of walking,” the art of perambulatory map-making initially described by Charles Baudelaire. Yet Bosman — convicted murderer, womanizer, drinker extraordinaire — was not, in Baudelaire’s polite phrase, “a gentleman stroller of the streets.” His gumshoe reportage in the ’30s and ’40s amounts to an extended elegy for a mining town hell bent on extinguishing the first fifty years of its history. Bosman battled this collective impulse; he understood, even before apartheid’s ascendancy in 1948, that to forget was itself an act of evil. After Bosman’s death in 1951, Abrahams took up the torch, writing of “the ignored persistent residue of primitive Johannesburg.”

These men told the unfolding history of a dusty mining town at the foot of Africa. Flâneurs in a city in which walking is a contact sport, they were ignored by their Commonwealth peers, perhaps because their work was searing yet ambiguous, written in an idiom that was not quite ours, and not exotic enough to be charming. They detailed the enduring, ineradicable stain of the white man in Africa, but refused to deny themselves Africanness. They lamented the impossibility of belonging; they warned of the dangers of remaining unmoored.

Born in the nearby city of Pretoria in 1957, Vladislavi? moved to Johannesburg in his early twenties. He lives in the hilly Kensington neighbourhood that Abrahams called home, ten minutes’ drive from the central business district, Johannesburg’s battleground of a downtown. His oeuvre is resolutely urban, in contrast to the empty, biblical Cape — white South Africa’s birthplace, the bitter anvil on which André Brink, J. M. Coetzee, and Damon Galgut forge their work.

Vladislavi?’s astonishing debut collection, Missing Persons (1989), tragically difficult to find outside of South Africa, contains a story that has come to define his career. In “Journal of a Wall,” a man obsessively diarizes his neighbour’s home renovation project. At first, he is a gushing cheerleader: “The wall... I began to see it not so much as a barrier between us, but as a meeting point. It was the thin line between pieces in a puzzle, the frontier on which both pieces become intelligible.” Slowly, as the wall goes up, this flim-flam disintegrates. “The world beyond the wall was empty: there was not even a world there.” The story is an elegy not just for missing neighbours, but for an errant country.

In his absurdist novella The Folly (1993) — a reference, perhaps, to the chilling Abrahams line “enough folly is necessity” — Vladislavi? returns to this idea. He details the building of a house by an oddball named Nieuwenhuizen (Newhouse), who is both observed and aided by his terrified, titillated neighbours. It’s a fine rendering of Vladislavi?’s twinned themes, both linked ineffably to apartheid: the brittleness of community; architecture as a barrier.

“The inspiration for Portrait with Keys,” he says, “was to take these thematic fixations just a little bit further. I was co-editing a comprehensive architectural study of South African space” — here, he is referring to the excellent Blank: Architecture, Apartheid and After (1998) — “and after writing some segments for the project, this idea of an ‘architected’ non-fiction look at Joburg was born.” The resulting text is a towering classic of South African literature. It suggests Croatian authors Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugresic, whose fragmentary style underlines their obsessions with personal and national balkanization. (Vladislavi?’s grandparents are from Bra?, and he has had a long-standing interest in writers from the former Yugoslav republics.) While the fragmented world in Portrait poignantly strains against disconnection, we cannot escape the feeling that our flâneur wanders alone, uninsured, at peril. Vladislavi?, who has an uncanny ability to cull the telling detail from the mess of Joburg life, hints at the stakes involved in utter dissolution.

Portrait reminds us of the often-hilarious indignities that arise when protecting oneself from a city that demands walls. Vladislavi? locks himself out of his bedroom; he locks himself inside his car. He watches a wall get painted, and painted again. He watches buildings die. The book is a series of do-overs, demolitions, erasures. The past is buried, the present a palimpsest that belongs to no one. While Portrait pulsates with his generous humanity — and is therefore necessarily hopeful — it does not offer bromides:

The places where our thoughts and feelings have brushed up against the world are not just for ourselves. We are like tramps, leaving secret signs for those who come after us, whom we expect to speak the same language. Our faith in the music of this double address, in the echo chambers of the head and the street, helps to explain why apartheid deafened us to the call of home.

For all its brilliance, Portrait with Keys comes with a built-in defect. Its fragmentary style admits defeat; the reader is reduced to peering through a literary keyhole. If Vladislavi?’s Johannesburg is a city that can only be glimpsed in pieces, where then can we go for a larger view?