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Resumen
Pulitzer Prize Finalist: "Something like Huckleberry Finn written by Cormac McCarthy: an adventure story as well as a meditation on the meaning of home." --The Times
Winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels East in search of his brother, from whom he was separated in the crowds and chaos during their journey across the sea. Moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing West, he is driven back again and again, meeting naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, swindlers, Indians, and lawmen--and his exploits turn him into a legend.
Just as its hero pushes against the tide, this widely acclaimed novel defies genre conventions--and "upends the romance and mythology of America's Western experience and rugged individualism" ( Star Tribune ).
"Suspenseful...a memorable immigration narrative, and a canny reinvention of the old-school western." --Publishers Weekly
"Exquisite: assured, moving, and masterful, as profound and precise an evocation of loneliness as any book I've ever read." --Lauren Groff, National Book Award-nominated author of Florida and Fates and Furies
Reseñas (5)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
In Diaz's debut, a brilliant and fresh take on the old-school western, a young Swedish immigrant named Håkan is separated from his brother, Linus, en route to America. Håkan lands in San Francisco knowing only that he must get to New York to find Linus, but his journey becomes a series of increasingly dangerous episodes. He becomes a sexual hostage of a saloon owner with "black, gleaming, toothless gums, streaked with bulging veins of pus"; is roped into a kooky naturalist's search in a dried-out seabed for a jellyfishlike proto-organism that supposedly created mankind; and is forced to kill marauders in self-defense. This latter episode leads to word spreading around the western territory that Håkan is an outlaw legend who literally keeps growing and growing in size, and, indeed, he becomes a giant by the book's end. Diaz cleverly updates an old-fashioned yarn, and his novel is rife with exquisite moments: Håkan has moving relationships with a horse named Pingo and another traveler named Asa, there's a drug-induced sequence in which Håkan looks at his own brain, and Håkan's very limited grasp of English heightens the suspense of his tense encounters. The book contains some of the finest landscape writing around, so potent because it reflects Håkan's solitude: "Nothing interrupted the mineral silence of the desert. In its complete stillness, the world seemed solid, as if made of one single dry block." (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
A Swedish boy walks across 19th-century America in a thrilling coming-of-age narrative that critiques frontier myths Hernan Diaz's captivating debut novel opens with an unforgettable scene: a huge, unnamed man - naked, grizzled and old - hauling himself through a star-shaped hole in the Alaskan ice from the freezing waters beneath, up on to the solid surface of the floe. It's an extraordinary image, and one which, by the novel's end, will have become even more powerful. This "lame colossus" turns out to be Håkan Söderström, and Diaz, having introduced his hero, plunges us swiftly into his tumultuous past. It all begins when Håkan and his elder brother, Linus, are dispatched by their father, a struggling Swedish farmer, to the US in search of a better life. It seems like a good plan: the year is 1850 or thereabouts, and the United States is booming. But in the first of a series of calamities, the boys lose each other en route, and Håkan, instead of going to New York with Linus, ends up on the other side of the country, in San Francisco. Penniless and without a word of English, he embarks on what seems to him the only possible course of action: to walk across America and find his brother. It's a thrilling narrative, full of twists and turns, David Copperfield with a twist of Tarantino and Deadwood perhaps So begins a page-turning adventure story that's also a profound meditation on solitude and companionship, foreignness and home; a bildungsroman in the grand 19th-century tradition that is also a fierce critique of the romanticised myths of the settlement of the American west. Diaz himself fled his native Argentina as a boy in the 70s, arriving as a refugee in Sweden with his family, then later moving to the US, and it's hard not to see something of his experience in Håkan's lonely odyssey: his acute sense of his own apartness, and his search for a place in the world. Heading east against the unstoppable tide of immigrants rolling west in their wagon trains, Håkan falls in with a succession of colourful characters, including a demented Irish gold prospector and a woman with no teeth who dresses him up in a velvet coat and buckled shoes. He meets a visionary naturalist and a horse called Pingo, a sadistic sheriff and a pair of predatory civil war soldiers. He traps animals and forages for food in the wilderness, and eventually becomes a wanted man. It's a thrilling narrative, full of twists and turns, that sees Håkan make the journey from young boy to "stupendously tall man"; and from innocence to experience - David Copperfield with a twist of Tarantino and Deadwood perhaps, or Great Expectations shot through with a dose of True Grit and Blood Meridian. And yet that's not quite a fair description. 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 we've ever encountered before. This is in large part because of Håkan himself, and Diaz's great achievement is the rigour with which he sticks to his hero's point of view. We see everything through Håkan's eyes, often from a distance as he plods on, observing the landscape, people and animals around him with only partial understanding. A mirrored wardrobe, abandoned beside the migrants' trail, first appears as a blinding light, "a detonation suspended in a flashing climax". The far-off sound of a harmonium arrives on the wind "in rags and tatters, like a torn flag" before he, or we, know what it is. A wagon train in the distance begins as nothing more than "a long, low creeping line" which finally emerges from the "odourless desert" in a profusion of smells. Later on, Håkan fails to identify an arrangement of wood as a railroad, or lengths of overhead wire as the transcontinental telegraph. The two civil war soldiers he meets appear to him merely as a blue soldier and a grey one. It's a revelation to Håkan when he at last finds companionship. The vast, empty plains around him, writes Diaz, "were no longer the oppressive immensity whose existence, for such a long time, had somehow been entrusted to Håkan's lonely gaze". Some of the most poignant passages deal with his tentative intimacy with others. When he does experience a physical awakening, he is slow to understand what's happening, even while he discovers the pleasure of being cared for, and what it means "to be seen by someone, to be in someone's brain". It's a moment of heart-breaking clarity, and a tribute to Diaz's artistry that he expresses it so simply. One of the many delights of In the Distance, which was a finalist for this year's Pulitzer prize in the US, is the way the writing oscillates between the austere and the lyrical, the realistic and the dream-like. The result is a singular and deeply affecting portrait of one man's life in a rapidly changing world, unlike any old-school or revisionist western I've experienced. Carys Davies's West is published by Granta. - Carys Davies.
Kirkus Review
Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel Garca Mrquez.Hkan Sderstrm 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 companycrooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest manand 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 untruebut 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 partysave that in Diaz's version, Hkan 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Reseña de Booklist
In this curious debut novel, scholar and critic Diaz combines a fastidious attention to historical detail with a playful repurposing of the myth of the American frontier. The saga begins with two emigrating Swedish brothers who lose each other during a transatlantic journey. Linus makes it to New York, but Håkan rounds Tierra del Fuego and winds up in San Francisco. Through a series of increasingly strange episodes, Håkan starts to make a name for himself. First, he convinces a suspicious gold panner to let him tag along, only to be taken hostage by a dangerously alluring mistress. When he makes a run for it, Håkan finds himself taken up by a crackpot biologist, and he joins in the search for a strange, gelatinous organism, a supposed predecessor to humankind. Despite his best efforts, Håkan's quest to reunite with his brother somehow always turns back to this expansive landscape. Stitched through with humor, this often-unpredictable novel will keep readers running along with every step of Håkan's odd escapades.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
DEBUT 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 © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
