Table of Contents
Ivan Vladislavić’s 101 Detectives is a sophisticated collection of short stories that delves into the intricacies of professional observation, the weight of personal and collective history, and the absurdities of modern corporate and industrial life. The narrative often centers on characters who are “detectives” in a literal or metaphorical sense watchers, auditors, storytellers, and archivists who navigate a world defined by surveillance, displacement, and the “pointless paper” of human existence.
The Fugu-Eaters: Surveillance and the Bitter Smoke of the Past
The collection opens with a story featuring two detectives, Klopper and Bate, who are engaged in a long-term surveillance operation from a tinted-window hotel room. The narrative is characterized by a stark contrast between the mundane physical discomforts of the present and the haunting memories of a more sinister past.
Bate is recovering from a traumatic dental experience. His mouth is a “wounded” landscape of empty sockets where his wisdom teeth were recently “splintered” out by a dentist he views as a “sadist”. To pass the time, he reads a Reader’s Digest article about the fugu fish, a Japanese delicacy whose gonads contain tetrodotoxin a poison twenty-seven times more deadly than a green mamba. The article details the “arduously trained” chefs required to prepare the fish and the “philosophy of the fugu-eaters,” which suggests that both eating and not eating the fish is “stupid”.
Klopper, meanwhile, is the senior observer, sitting “the wrong way round on a chair” at the window, his chin propped on his wrist. He is obsessed with professional discipline, insisting that they leave “not a crumb” behind in the room. However, his mind frequently drifts back to a pivotal event from their past: a “fire” initiated by their Captain.
Klopper recalls transporting plastic-wrapped evidence on the back of a bakkie to a remote farm. Instead of burying the files as planned, the Captain decided to burn them, declaring that “what goes up in smoke is gone for good”. As the fire raged by a dam, the Captain revealed his profound loneliness; his wife had left him for a “Sandton desk jockey,” leaving him to live on takeaways. In the “heart of the fire,” the detectives watched as layers of “blackened leaves” came away from the spines of dockets and logbooks, and “new white pages unfolded,” revealing recognizable handwriting even in the cinders. The smoke, “compounded of leather and ink and sealing wax,” made Klopper acutely aware of the “taste of blood” on his own tongue, a sensory bridge between the destruction of the evidence and the meat they were braaing.
Hair Shirt: Myth, Memory, and the Allergic Reaction to History
In “Hair Shirt,” a young South African man living in San Diego recounts a road trip with his girlfriend, Mel, to her parents’ home in Oklahoma City. The narrator is a man without a visa or prospects, existing in a “precarious” state and constructing a “fantasy” of his future to impress Mel’s parents, Mike and Hedda Liebman.
The story shifts into a surreal, mythic register when Mel and the narrator drive into the Arkansas mountains to visit Uncle Colley. Colley is the “black sheep” of the family, a man whose entire body is covered in thick hair. In his youth, he had been displayed in “freak shows” as a “wolfman” or “apeman”.
The narrator’s encounter with Colley is defined by a “vision” that transcends psychology and leans into a “medieval bestiary”. Through the slats of a blind, the narrator observes Mel bathing Colley in a metal tub behind his ramshackle cabin. He describes Colley as a “shaggy hound” or a “dog-headed man” who moans with “painful pleasure” as Mel scrubs foam into his fur with a long-handled brush. When Colley stands, the narrator sees him as the “head of a man on the body of a beast”. As a parting gift, Colley gives the narrator a “red flannel shirt” that smells of “bacon grease and sweat” and is filled with hard red earth from nesting insects. Although the narrator discards the shirt on the way home, its impact persists.
The climax occurs at a Shabbos dinner at the Liebmans’ house, attended by Mel’s uncle, Morris, a psychologist with an “ambiguous” bow tie and a “puffy hand”. Morris interrogates the narrator about South Africa, claiming he “despises apartheid” but also mocking the narrator’s “master race” background. During the meal, as Morris discusses the “wasteful excesses of modern healers” and diseases of the skin like “urticaria” and “suppurating boils,” the narrator suffers a violent allergic reaction. His “skin crawled,” his belly was “covered with red spots,” and his neck puffed out “like a bullfrog’s”. Morris takes charge, administering a tranquilizer and observing that “the skin never lies” and that one “never knows what will come to the surface”.
101 Detectives: The Ordinary and the Undercover
The title story follows Joseph Blumenfeld, a detective who travels to a convention titled “101 Detectives: Sub-Saharan Africa”. Blumenfeld is a man in a constant state of “undercover” anxiety, unsure whether his “special quality” is his own “ordinariness”.
Upon arriving at his hotel, he is greeted by a personalized message on the TV screen: “Sunny Bonani welcomes Mr Joseph Blumenfeld”. The sight of his own name his undercover name in red letters causes a “cold fist” to clench in his gut, making him feel like an “imposter”. He recalls the advice of his mentor, Long John de Lange, who taught him that all detectives feel like “charlatans”.
Blumenfeld spends much of the story obsessing over the details of his environment and his own physical and mental state. He takes a “toxicity test” from a leaflet given to him by a man at the airport, ticking boxes that confirm he feels “fatigued for no apparent reason,” “wooden,” and “less alert”. He examines his room with clinical suspicion, noting a “ballpoint pen on the dresser” and the “lion rampant” crest on the towelling dressing gown.
His narrative is a meditation on the different “types” of detectives: the “obsessive-compulsive Jews,” the “guilt-ridden Catholics,” the “Lutheran haemophiliacs,” and the “sodden colleagues” who bond over gin and tonic. He reflects on the “pointless rigmarole of introduction” at conventions where everyone is undercover and the modern “slob” detectives who wear “Iron Maiden T-shirts” and “thick-lipped trainers”. Eventually, Blumenfeld suspects the entire convention is an “elaborate sting” to “do away with me,” as he recognizes none of the names on the organizing committee. The story ends with him paralyzed by indecision, trapped between his need for an “exit strategy” and his habitual “waiting”.
Exit Strategy: The Corporate Storyteller and the Art of Falling
“Exit Strategy” introduces a corporate storyteller who works on the 11th floor of a high-tech office building. Her job is to provide “parables” and “fresh and leafy input” for board meetings and “Green Day” events. She feels “gnarled as an old vine” and is preoccupied with the “poles of her narrative system”: up and down, in and out, big and small.
The central motif of her story is the “recitation pod,” a device she must “thrust her head into” to speak her “truth”. The pod smells of “ammonia” but emits a pleasant “glandular” fragrance of “cinnamon, cloves, and caramelised sugar” to encourage “output”. Inside the pod, the space feels “endless” and “laden with dark shades,” but the storyteller feels “stifled,” her jaw “numb and immobile”.
Her narrative arc involves two main threads:
- The Basement Archive: She applies for a higher office but is instead shown a room in the basement, the third level of the parking garage. This room was the office of the original corporate storyteller. It is a “small, busy room” filled with the “corporate fictions” thousands of books and paper records that have been “outsourced” and “plugged” from the digital system. The sight of these “unrestricted” paper memories overwhelms her, making her “heart soar” despite the lack of a window.
- The Climber: From her window, she witnesses a “bargain-basement superhero” climbing the glass façade of the building. He is the “Human Fly,” sheathed in a “climbing suit” with pectorals and biceps “screen-printed on the fabric”. She watches as he reaches the “most dangerous part” the 21st floor where the “channels in the window frames” end and he must find an “exit strategy”.
The story concludes with the storyteller pressing her own “left hand” against a “powdery impression of a palm” left by the climber on the glass. This “consoling symmetry” lifts her feet from the floor, making her feel as if she is “rising, going up,” finally embracing an exit strategy of her own.
The Reading: Translation as Resurrection
“The Reading” is set in a Literaturhaus in Germany, where a Ugandan writer, Maryam Akello, is reading from her book, Sugar. The audience listens to her “soft-grained monotone” Acholi voice, though most do not understand the language. Her translator, Hans Günther Basch, sits on the podium, preoccupied by his own process and his recent meeting with Akello in his kitchen.
Akello’s reading style is described as the “sewing machine” style, a “blank monotone” that allows the listener to apply their own “emphases” and “tints”. The content of her book is “harrowing”: it details her and her sister Anya’s abduction by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
Basch recalls his struggle to translate a specific line where Akello describes her sister’s murder. Akello had written in the margin of the manuscript the word “translated” to describe Anya’s death, as if “death itself were a language”. The passage Basch eventually reads describes the LRA commander killing Anya with a “panga” because she “slipped on the shale and falls,” breaking a box of “bullets”. The survivors are forced to “step on this thing that was Anya” as a “lesson”.
As Basch reaches the final lines of the translation “I have translated you from the dead” he has a psychological breakdown. He is overcome by a “sob” that rings through the loudspeakers, his “face began to crumble” as he “wept as if he would never stop”. The audience is left in a state of “consternation,” while Akello herself remains “compose d ” and “remote”.
The Trunks: A Complete History of Pointless Paper
The final significant narrative in the collection involves a writer who inherits the trunks of Claude and his father Berti. The trunks had been in storage in Cape Town for “nearly half a century” after the two arrived from Europe after WWII.
The writer spends years “cataloguing” the contents:
- The Trunks: There are four of them, ranging from an “enormous travelling chest” the size of a “coffin” to a “smaller metal trunk” and a “wooden chest with leather trim”.
- The Contents: The writer finds 215 books, ranging from A Harum-Scarum Schoolgirl to anti-Semitic “diatribes”. The books are “marked by cigarette burns,” “food stains,” and “moth wings”. There are also “Berti’s cut-throat razors,” “twelve pairs of glasses,” and “bundles of letters” in “coffee-coloured envelopes”.
- The “Pointless Paper”: The writer becomes overwhelmed by the “haze of irretrievable significance” in these objects. He realizes that the trunks are a “prophecy” of the “pointless end that awaits all those who set too much store by the written word”.
The writer moves the trunks from a “self-storage depot” to his own “guest suite”. After a thief breaks into the guest suite and “ransack s the trunks” without finding anything of value, the writer decides to “dismember” the collection. He donates the books to an “SPCA shop” and has the Salvation Army take the empty trunks and papers away in a “lorry”. He concludes that the “restless passage” of Claude and Berti’s lives has been “irrecoverably lost,” a realization that brings “tears to his eyes”.
Additional Sketches: Art, Industry, and Mourning
- Mountain Landscape: A CEO, H.K. Khoza, writes to a curator regarding a Pierneef painting he discovered in a “storeroom on the nineteenth floor”. He defends the painting against academic critiques that call it “dehistoricised,” arguing that it “commands attention” and provides a “proprietorial gaze” that aligns with “corporate culture”.
- Lullaby: A businessman in Mauritius observes a woman, Martha, and her son, Eckie, who share an intense, “unnormal” affection. After the businessman witnesses an “impression of Eckie’s ear” on Martha’s shoulder after a nap, the story ends in tragedy: Eckie drowns during a catamaran trip when he is “caught in a tangle of lines” under the boat.
- Industrial Theatre: A narrator attends a “lavish” launch for the new Ford Kafka, an event where the “point is not character but action” and the “climax” is all that matters. The launch features a “spectacle” of “sacrificial victims” on rising columns and an actor playing Kafka in a “trenchcoat and broad-brimmed hat”.
- Dead Letters: A photographer, Neville Lister, creates a project based on a cache of “dead letters” mail that was “never delivered because the addresses were incomplete”. The letters include a teacher’s concern about a student in South Africa “dressed as a black man” in 1978 and a man’s anxiety about “nameless thing s ” buried in his backyard in Laingsburg.
Conclusion: The Echoing Solitudes
Vladislavić’s collection is a haunting exploration of the human desire to document and the failure to truly know. Whether it is the detectives watching a street, the corporate storyteller searching for a parable, or the archivist cataloging a stranger’s life, the characters are all searching for a “firm and true foundation” that is constantly being undermined by the “clutter” and “pointless paper” of their own histories. The “dream count” of these detectives is a record of loss, surveillance, and the “serrated scars” of the past.