In the Distance

by Hernan Diaz Narrated by Peter Berkrot

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for In the Distance:

“A gorgeously written novel that charts one man’s growth from boyhood to mythic status as he journeys between continents and the extremes of the human condition.” —Pulitzer Prize finalist citation
 
“Strange and transporting . . .  In the Distance [is] an uncanny achievement.” —The New York Times
 
“The prose is as unbroken as the horizon. . . . It’s as if Herman Melville had navigated the American West, instead of the ocean.” —The Nation

“This suspenseful novel is a potent depiction of loneliness, a memorable immigration narrative, and a canny reinvention of the old-school western.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“Plainspoken and wildly, even cosmically, evocative . . . In the end the reader understands the country’s twin potential for horror and hope.” —Whiting Award citation

“A singular and deeply affecting portrait of one man’s life in a rapidly changing world.” —The Guardian

“An ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.” —Kirkus Reviews

“In the Distance did something new . . . raising important questions about cultural attitudes made evident by assumptions we make about art, particularly toward guns and immigrants. It’s also just a great story.” —The Paris Review
 
“[In the Distance] excels in creating a sense of disorientating foreignness. The result is 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 Sunday Times

“Stitched through with humor, this often-unpredictable novel will keep readers running along with every step of Håkan’s odd escapades.” —Booklist
 
“Diaz is bound to join ranks with Borges on the literary scene with this mythical personality, still at large in our consciousness long after we’ve put down the book.” —BookPage

“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 traveling east.” —Library Journal (starred review)
 
“[An] extraordinary epic tale of a lone man’s journey into the heart of the American frontier.” —Financial Times

Library Journal

★ 09/01/2017
After immigrating to America from Sweden in the 1840s, young Håkan Söderström is separated from his brother in New York and inadvertently boards a ship bound for California, arriving during the Gold Rush. He befriends a family of Irish immigrants and join them in the goldfields until he is captured by vigilantes, taken to a nearby town, and made a virtual prisoner. Håkan's escape begins many years of adventures across the West. He first falls in with a naturalist who teaches him about science, then with a group of settlers, killing religious zealots who attack their wagon train, becoming a legend—and a wanted man—across the West. 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 traveling east. In this world, American individualism becomes the isolation that is its shadow and the dream of freedom devolves into anarchic violence. And while Håkan longs for community, he finds himself a stranger everywhere. VERDICT Resonant historical fiction with a contemporary feel.—Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Kirkus Reviews

2017-07-17
Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel García Márquez.Håkan Söderström is a force of nature, a wild giant whose name, in the frontier America in which he has landed, is rendered as the Hawk. On the docks back in Gothenburg he was separated from his brother, Linus, and he has sworn to find him in a land so big he can scarcely comprehend it. The Hawk lands in California and ventures eastward only to find himself in all kinds of odd company—crooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest man—and a tide of history that keeps pushing him back to the west. Along the way, his exploits, literary scholar Diaz (Hispanic Institute/Columbia Univ.; Borges, Between History and Eternity, 2012) writes, are so numerous that he has become a legend in a frontier full of them; for one thing, says an awe-struck traveler, "He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Just to keep him away." The Hawk protests that most of what has been said about him is untrue—but not all of it. As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs his adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. One fine set piece is a version of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which religious fanatics dressed as Indians attack a pioneer party—save that in Diaz's version, Håkan tears his way across the enemy force with a righteous fury befitting an avenging angel. "He knew he had killed and maimed several men," Diaz writes, memorably, "but what remained most vividly in his mind was the feeling of sorrow and senselessness that came with each act: those worth defending were already dead, and each of his killings made his own struggle for self-preservation less justifiable." Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171388324
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	10/10/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	602,896

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