I guess what I’m trying to do is explain why I’m rather perplexed about my response to a book that I expected to land on my favorites list! Perhaps I’m just not in the right frame of mind currently. Now, however, it seems to have been a competent story and one that I am happy to have read, but not one that I’m overly inclined to gush over. While in the moment, the book entertained and the writing impressed me. To some extent, that is what has happened in the case of In the Distance. Other times I note that a novel’s staying power is rapidly diminishing. Sometimes the passage of so many days confirms that a book and its characters refuse to let go their hold on me.
This gap in time allows me to reflect on the impact of a story. This is at first an obvious disadvantage, as I need to sift through my notes more thoroughly before typing up my thoughts. When I sit down to write a review, I’m often weeks behind with four or five books having been read in the interim. He had remained in a constant present, leaving landscapes and people behind but never heading toward a more or less certain destination that he could foresee.” “Håkan had been traveling away from the past but not into the future. Hernán Díaz 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. With the double intention of getting away from the trail and the cold, he had traveled south for days. But there were no such travelers-the moving shadows he saw almost every day in the distance were illusions.
Had Håkan and his animals ever been spotted, the distant travelers would have taken the vanishing silhouettes for a mirage. He did this each time he thought he spied someone on the circular horizon. Díaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre (travel narratives, the bildungsroman, nature writing, the Western), offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.Īt first, it was a contest, but in time the beasts understood that, with an embrace and the slightest push, they had to lie down on their side and stay until Håkan got up.
Driven back over and over again on his journey through vast expanses, Håkan meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. He travels east in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great push to the west. A young Swedish boy finds himself penniless and alone in California.
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