In the Distance
Staff Reviews
For readers who enjoy historical novels set in the old west, but not 'westerns," IN THE DISTANCE sails Hakan from Sweden to California and then across rugged terrain. He is trying to reach his brother in New York, and the story of his peregrinations is told beautifully. There are incandescent passages of nature writing and meetings with settlers and natives. This book knocked me off my rocker and I look forward to reading more from Hernan Diaz.
Description
Finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing West. Driven back again and again, he meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, swindlers, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre, offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.
Hernan Diaz is the author of Borges, Between History and Eternity (Bloomsbury 2012), managing editor of RHM, and associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University. He lives in New York.
Praise for In the Distance
Diaz cleverly updates an old-fashioned yarn, and his novel is rife with exquisite moments Publishers Weekly, boxed and starred reviewAs 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
