Publishers Weekly
★ 10/05/2020
A childhood obsession with Muhammad Ali informs the life of a South African writer in Vladislavic’s dazzling, deeply felt meditation on cultural identity and anxiety (after Flashback Hotel). In anticipation of Ali’s first fight with Joe Frazier in 1971, 12 year-old Joe, who is white, creates the first of several scrapbooks dedicated to his hero. The scrapbooks document five years of Ali’s fights and epic celebrity evoking the colorful blow-by-blow prose of pre-television sportswriters, conjuring for Joe an America as mythical as it is distant. While the racial and political conflicts swirling around Ali are greatly relevant in apartheid-era Pretoria, Joe is as much stirred by the fighter’s language, physical beauty, and otherworldly charisma. “He was a floating poem itself,” Joe reflects in the present, “an animate, explosive piece of pop verse, a sprung rhythm.” Joe and his dismissive older brother, Branko, trade narration in alternating sections, recalling their adolescent trials in love, friendship, and family, until tragedy strikes and one brother is left holding the unfinished manuscript they’d worked on together. Vladislavic inserts actual newspaper cuttings into the narrative, which are cited and set in gray text, making this a remarkable ode to the written and spoken word, filled with fascinating and moving metaphysical interventions. The result is an extraordinary palimpsest of pulp reporting, cultural anthropology, and personal diary. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"The Distance is a skillfully conducted chorus of language and voices. . . Vladislavić deftly alternates between the two narrators with a speed that, in the hands of a lesser linguist, could leave readers with verbal whiplash but, in this case, serves to highlight the fact that even shared memories can be vastly different. . . This contemplative coming-of-age story set in Apartheid-era South Africa is juxtaposed with the iconic Muhammad Ali fights." —Grace Rajendran, in Shelf Awareness
"South African novelist Vladislavić delivers a moving, closely observed study in family dynamics in a time of apartheid...Vladislavić's tale unfolds with grace and precision. A memorable, beautifully written story of love and loss." — Kirkus, Starred Review
"This bittersweet story of hero worship and political awakening has a pole-axing sting in the tail. It focuses on two brothers, Joe and Branko, growing up white in Seventies South Africa...We cut between the two men in name-tagged segments that mingle recollections of adolescent longing with sharply observed scenes of their hesitant relationship as adults..In this instantly engaging novel, told in thoughtful but direct style, all the cleverness is under the bonnet." — Daily Mail
"Set in apartheid South Africa, this allegory of boxing, blood and brotherhood ripples with meanings and possibilities...In a country where language is profoundly, and knottily, connected to race and power, it is also a bulwark, and an escape...Full of grace and tenderness, The Distance is a searing tale of loss and learning as well as a beautiful evocation of brotherhood during a time of discord." — New Welsh Review
"Boxing is just one example of the kinds of opposing forces that Vladislavić explores with wit and sensitivity in this book: fact versus fiction, boyhood versus adulthood, masculinity versus machismo, apartheid versus freedom, and, most potently, brother versus brother." — Mark Athitakis, On the Seawall
"A beautifully, thoughtfully crafted novel ... [The Distance] seeks to engage the reader — subtly, but in astonishingly many different ways, on questions about everything from race to how one can present narratives, from capturing a boxing match to attempts at autobiography to the films Branko's son is experimenting with. Vladislavić again shows himself to be an exceptional writer — and this, as perhaps his most readily accessible work (though in fact it is many layers deep), is a good introduction to his work." — The Complete Review
"Violence meets quiet, action edges toward observation, and personality gives way to place. But where The Distance, like Portrait with Keys before it, asks that the reader build links across and between planes of memory, history, and city, the virtual world with which the book’s past collides is discomfitingly edgeless. Vladislavic is an auteur of this moment of collision. Always hovering just askew of the city he loves, his is a voice for making new spaces within it." — Africa is a Country
"One of South Africa's most finely tuned observers." - Ted Hodgkinson, Times Literary Supplement
"The writing has a quality of unpredicitability, a wildness that seeps through the fabric of Vladislavic's peerless linguistic control. Ivan Vladislavic is one of the most significant writers working in English today. Everyone should read him. " - Katie Kitamura, BOMB
"The Distance is a moving, sharply observed novel confronting questions of race, memory and forgetting, underlain by the necessity and difficulty of wrestling the past into story." - Cameron Woodhead, Sydney Morning Herald
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-06-17
South African novelist Vladislavić delivers a moving, closely observed study in family dynamics in a time of apartheid.
Like the author, Joe and Branko Blahavić are the descendants of a Croatian migrant who landed in South Africa and stayed, of which their father remarks, “He knew people in Pretoria. That’s what immigrants do. They find some connection to help them out until they’re on their feet.” Joe would rather be by the sea than in the waterless Transvaal, but, around the time of the Fight of the Century—the 1971 smackdown between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier—he contents himself with keeping elaborate scrapbooks devoted to The Champ: “In the buildup to the fight I started to collect cuttings,” says Joe, “and for the next five years I kept everything about Ali that I could lay my hands on, trimming hundreds of articles out of the broadsheets and pasting them into scrapbooks.” Joe and Branko’s childhood closeness widens in adolescence and adulthood, but the distance of which Vladislavić writes comes in many forms: that of the immigrants from an apartheid society, that of families as the children grow up and move away, in Joe’s case to America, where he becomes a writer. Joe returns to South Africa but suffers a bad end, leaving it to Branko to reconstruct his brother’s life through those scrapbooks and complete the book Joe has been contracted to write about them. “Scenes from our childhood flicker to life and I write them down as they come. That’s something he taught me: thinking about writing is not the same as actually doing it,” Branko says, later texting Joe’s editor, “Btw the book is not actually about Ali.” Indeed it’s not, though the boisterous Ali is a leitmotif. It helps to know a little South African patois (“Going to the rofstoei on a Saturday night is a big thing for two teenage boys, especially when we don’t have to take care of the lighties”), but allowing for a few linguistic puzzles, Vladislavić’s tale unfolds with grace and precision.
A memorable, beautifully written story of love and loss.
