A memoir of place and sexuality, home and identity.
“Make no mistake: in spite of everything, this is a love letter [to Johannesburg].”
So writes Emma Brockes in her Guardian review of Lost and Found in Johannesburg. Published in 2012, this is Mark’s meditation on place and sexuality, home and identity.
As a boy growing up in apartheid Johannesburg, Mark Gevisser would play ‘Dispatcher’, a game that involved sending imaginary couriers on routes mapped out from Holmden's Register of Johannesburg. As the phantom fleet made its way across the the troubled city's atomized geographies, so too did the young dispatcher begin to figure out his own place in the world.
With the maps and photographs he has collected over two decades, Mark Gevisser plots his path across the city of his birth, from his early exploration of his gay identity to his brutal experience, as an adult, of an armed home invasion He tracks back along his Jewish immigrant family's routes to South Africa, from Vlinius, Dublin and Jerusalem, before immersing himself in the Johannesburg of today.
In a style that balances gripping storytelling with deep lyricism and boundary-breaking pastiche, Gevisser finds himself, loses himself, and finds himself again in the city of his birth.
* Also published as Dispatcher: Lost and Found in Johannesburg
Extracts.
“You must respect us or we will kill you”
The Telegraph
“Going Back to My Routes: Finding A Way to Call Joburg Home”
Mail & Guardian
Reviews.
“Lyrical and achingly touching…. a riveting and enchantingly nuanced tale of a young white writer-to-be’s growing understanding of the racially charged land he was born into, as well as a more personal journey: his coming out as a gay man.”
- Scott Kraft, Los Angeles Times
“Great writing…. one comes away from this book reminded of what a magnificent city Johannesburg is – a fierce, ambitious, global metropolis, sharper than London, more bolshie even than New York.”