In the Distance

(Paperback)

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Description

Diaz is originally from Argentina, was raised in Sweden, and now lives in New York, giving his writing, and perspective, and insistently cosmopolitan qualitythis western is unencumbered by a narrow idea of America.
Hkan's profound isolation (his height, his lack of English, his foreignness) give the novel a loneliness and futility that push back against common tropes (manifest destiny, individualism) of the genre.
Hkan's encounters with miners, naturalists, fundamentalists, and swindlers, all are instances of some form of plunder, complicating notions of discovery that so often efface the precolonial civilizations of the United States.
Physical descriptions of the land, as well as Hkan's complete ignorance of the country where he finds himself, create a portrait of stirring, impassive, destructive space and scale, the likes of which were unimaginable to European settlers.
Fans of the best of Westerns (their darkness, their emotional punch) will gravitate to Diaz for his lack of sentiment and the awe and despair the landscape and his character's story conjures up in him.

Reviews

Winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction APublishers WeeklyTop Ten Book of 2017 Finalist for the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Finalist for the Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Award An affecting oddness is the great virtue of In the Distance, along with its wrenching evocations of its main characters loneliness and grief. And its ability to create lustrous mindscapes from wide-open spaces, from voids that are never empty.New York Times Diaz cleverly updates an old-fashioned yarn, and his novel is rife with exquisite moments. Publishers Weekly, boxed andstarred review As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs [Hawks] adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. . . . An ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.Kirkus Stitched through with humor, this often-unpredictable novel will keep readers running along with every step of Hkans odd escapades.Booklist Hernan Diazs In the Distance is exquisite: assured, moving, and masterful, as profound and precise an evocation of loneliness as any book Ive ever read. Lauren Groff This suspenseful novel is a potent depiction of loneliness, a memorable immigration narrative, and a canny reinvention of the old-school western.Publishers Weekly What Diaz pulls off here is that rare feat of drawing on literary and filmic traditions, only to conjure something completely fresh and strange. In the Distance is a brutal, sad, tender coming-of-age story, set in a historical past that feels both familiar and at the same time like nothing weve ever encountered before. The Guardian ...richly drawn and something like Huckleberry Finn written by Cormac McCarthy: an adventure story as well as a meditation on the meaning of home.The Times Perhaps most striking is Diazs ability to describe the known as unknown, the all too familiar when it is yet unfamiliar. The nature of his protagonist, Hkan Sderstrm, a lost and wandering Swedish immigrant in the rough, largely uninhabited American territory, allows Diaz to write of what it is like to encounter the foreign or forgotten, such that the reader has a similarly enlightening experience, encountering it anew.Paris Review Daily In the Distance draws a tall silhouette in the horizon fleeing the plenty for the void. A Sisyphus worn out by the western sun. Le Monde It is poetic, nearly unreal and especially thrilling like the picaresque stories of the 18th century. We think of Fnelons Aventures de Tlmaque. The novel of a great writer. A Nous Paris! A meditation on life, nature, the cycles that move as well as root us. The Concourse Hkan by Diaz predates nationalities: he is profoundly human. Otra Parte While set in the American West, this is no conventional Western, as it turns the genre's stereotypes upside down, taking place on a frontier as much mythic as real with a main character Resonant historical fiction with a contemporary feel.Library Journal,starred review There are plenty of novels that include questing through the American West of the 19th century. Ive read my share. In the Distance is more whole, more crackling, alive, awake, and speaking than any of those others.Publishers Weekly Ultimately, it is a combination of nuanced characters like Hkan and finely-tuned, lyrical prose that enables Diaz to wildly succeed here in humanizing an often mythologized time in history.The Arkansas International Hernan Diazs strange, absorbing novel In the Distance the story of Hkan Sderstrm, a Swedish immigrant whose journey in the American West is fraught with confusion, loss, loneliness and seclusion upends the romance and mythology of Americas Western experience and rugged individualism.Star Tribune A sensitively written, often harrowing odyssey through the desertKenyon Review The breadth and deployment of Diazs argot is simply astounding. His sentences are crisp, speckled with terms esoteric to an era yet idiomatically clear in their function. And more than any historical reimagining, Hkans desperate, often desultory journey blurs the line between purpose and nihilism, hope and despair, swirling together the variegation of human agency and circumstance until we find ourselves staring at the ineffable being that has become of Hkan, a life so saturated with learning, love, and loss that we have no choice but to accept his final measure.The Atticus Review A gritty, dreamy anti-Western Western. This books unflinching exposure of our foundational American myths about individualism and violence is so well-executed that it feels nothing short of subversive.Literary Hub An infectious story of one mans quest for solitude and understanding, In the Distance is a noteworthy, original debut.The Gazette [In the Distance] is an episodic picaresque adventure, but the transitions are so smoothand the prose is as unbroken as the horizonthat the past fades away like a dream. Its as if Herman Melville had navigated the American West, instead of the ocean.The Nation [In the Distance] is a good old-fashioned yearning of the human spirit, and a beautifully commodious meditation on its absolute unknowability.Financial Times Hernan Diazs In the Distance will haunt me forever, a narrative that continues to astound me, and I think a near perfect portrayal of aloneness and solitude and deep longing.The Millions [In the Distance] is a hero's journey, or possibly a monster's journeythe ending recalls the austere beauty of the last scenes of Frankensteinand one of the great pleasures of Diaz's singular book is to observe the complicated ways in which the hero and the monster coexist.BOMB Diaz writes the experience of being a stranger as well as anyone (theres a full page of English as Hakan hears it that is perfect), and In the Distance deals beautifully with the endless expanse of a country, and the claustrophobic space of a mind after trauma.Remezcla Like Hkans America, so too does In the Distance firmly exist in the realm of the possible. Yet Dazs great gift lies in reconfiguring the possible, the expected, the taken-for-granted into something extraordinary.Paste Its a gorgeous journey, a profound homage to Americas natural beauty.CounterPunch In this novel, Diaz deftly creates the postmodern landscape, one filled with sites of profit-extraction and knowledge-digging.3:AM Magazine A Swedish immigrant, the American West, and the powers of fate unite in Hernan Diazs stunning novel, In the Distance.Foreword Reviews The prose is surreal and wondrous, especially in its evocation of a landscape that exists more in allegory than historical fact.Tor.com "[In the Distance] is shot through with breathtaking imagery and moments of real profundityan unforgettable incident on a salt lake, a gut-wrenching sequence in a desert caon, a tense climax in a subterranean enclaveand all of these derive their power from Diazs meticulous approach to his protagonists point-of-view.Necessary Fiction A brilliant reimagining of the Western and adventure genres. More pensive than violent, it presents a unique version of the American landscape.Porter Square Books This is a strange and brilliant version of historical fiction, twisting the genre into something unique.Porter Square Books Newsletter, Featured Staff Pick In the Distanceis a singular and haunting novel, an epic journey into the wilderness of nineteenth-century America and into the depths of solitude. In its majestic evocation of landscapes it bears a resemblance toBlood Meridian, but in the meditative precision of its language and the moral compass that spins at its heart, Diazs novel is a creature all its own, and its one of the very few works of fiction that transport you, emotionally and imaginatively, to an utterly new place. Its a breathtaking trip.Paul La Farge If I could hand you this book I would. Read this. Hernan Diazs In the Distance is a portrait of this country as both a dreamscape and a living nightmare. With echoes of John Williamss Butchers Crossing, Andrey Platonovs Soul, and Richard Hughess A High Wind in Jamaica, this is fiction at its finestpropulsive, unsettling, wildly ambitious, and an unforgettable journey that we will certainly return to in the years to come.Paul Yoon, author ofThe Mountain In the Distance by Hernan Diaz sends a shotgun blast through standard received notions of the Old West and who was causing trouble in it. Hkan and his adventures, which are truly extraordinary, not to mention beautifully written, had me from the novels first striking chapter to the last.Laird Hunt A beautiful, expansive revisionist Western full of humanity." Citizen Times On its surface, In the Distance is a haunting and unique tale of survivalwith all the thrilling frustrations of such. Deeper still, it is a story about the devastation wrought by the American Dreamthe West as it happened to many, in spite of all theyd hoped.Colin Winnette Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize 2018, this strange, sinister tale bewitches, making the wild west of America as intense and otherworldly as any dark myth.The Irish Times Great stories are driven by desire. Hkan Sderstrm, the remarkable protagonist of Hernan DiazsIn the Distance,sets off on an unremitting quest to find his brother. As he journeys against the grain of the frontier, Hkan confronts lust, love, honor, greed, and confounding betrayal. He also crafts a solitude that becomes, in Diazs skilled hands, as American as the landscape. In prose that is as bold as the western sky, Diaz has written an unforgettable tale of soulfulness and survival.Alyson Hagy, author ofBoleto "The way [In the Distance is] written . . . is so fluid and beautifulits like watching an intellectual Western."Angel Olsen While In the Distance can be read as a revisionist westernand totally enjoyed and chewed on as suchwhat makes Dazs book truly exceptional is how far beyond a simple genre it goes. A beautiful, thoughtful, and often heartbreaking exploration of lonesomeness, the simple confusion of just living, and the magnificent need for human connection. Justin Souther, Malaprops Bookstore Diaz achieves something subtle yet tremendous through In the Distance. He looks back at yesterday to find a hyperbolic image of Americas immigration story today.Ploughshares Blog Diazs captivating description, told through the eyes of someone genuinely baffled by much of what he sees, will appeal to the travel writing devotee in most of us and catapult us beyond the banalities of modern life into something rich and strange.Ozy A tremendous debut novel and an epic American story.Keaton Patterson,Brazos Bookstore The western as American myth is no new thing, but rarely has it been done so well. A picaresque, a bildungsroman, a parable, and a survivor tale all in one, Hernan Diazs story of Hkan, a Swedish immigrant forced to fend for himself in the American West, has an epic feel that belies the slender books page count. This is the kind of non-whitewashed American mythology that nurses a kernel of truth: Are we not all immigrants to a world we hoped would be better, encountering on lifes journey few friends and more foes, all of whom influence our understanding of the world and leave lasting impressions even after the memory of their faces fade Christopher Phipps, East Bay Booksellers

Author Bio

Hernan Diaz is the author of Borges, Between History and Eternity (Bloomsbury, 2012) and the associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University. He lives in New York.