Name: c0up's review of In the Distance by Hernán Díaz
Item: In the Distance
Rating: 4.5
Author: c0up

Hernán Díaz

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

In the Distance

A young Swedish boy, separated from his brother, becomes a man; the man, despite himself, becomes a legend and outlaw.

"Life! Feel it return!" - Me reading this book

The man sure knows how to write. His descriptions of evil early on are dazzling.

c0up

"Life! Feel it return!" - Me reading this book

The man sure knows how to write. His descriptions of evil early on are dazzling.

Chris Dailey

Fabulously subtle journey around and across the American West through the eyes of a almost mythological foreigner that recasts the immigration archetype. Granted the opportunity to flee rural Sweden, Haiken (called Hawk in the US) wanders through California gold country, Utah's Salt Flats, the Prairie and the canyonlands in effort to find his lost brother. Centering on the experience of the American pioneer, the novel is more interested in insolation, education, companionship, the hardships and rewards of living off the land, and ultimately man's relationship with nature and himself. Touching, yet stoic, the novel accomplishes many things: historical realism, naturalism advocacy and most of all, tenderness of the human spirit.

Elena Kuran

A lonely and marvelous book. One of the best novels i've ever read

Cody Degen

Maybe closer to 2.5 stars. Something about the balance of realism to suspension of disbelief didn’t sit right with me. If it was more in one camp or more in the other I would’ve liked it more I think.

that’s the whole book, i fear. a western so apparently singular that it bordered on caricature in its subversion. i don’t even know if it teetered over the line; i’ve got no frame of reference beyond film. it’s not entirely devoid of blinks of warmth and tenderness, of something brighter and more layered than the monotony and passivity, and i did feel for those moments—but then they would pass, and what i ended up with were around 200 pages of emotional edging punctuated by adjectives and attributive verbs so intrusive it felt like having your skull bludgeoned in as they piled up. 

still, you gotta admit that humanism is at times only possible through real

nihilism, that you can’t confront real nihil more directly than through an aimless track across endless land. when i was reading the first section of 

it felt like there was something precise and new about loneliness vs. solitude that hernan diaz was close to sliding under a microscope and singling out even in the edith wharton-y descriptions of the rasks’ childhoods and dispositions, and håkan is something of a predecessor to that level of interiority exactly bc he’s its antithesis: a character whose 

and it so happens that the Business Of Being is destined to be done, inevitably, alone, and despite having no animating factor otherwise. 

i still enjoyed seeing håkan’s life backdropped against an america still coming into itself, even if the details were significant only bc you knew what they would become later: the country’s rapid growth into systems and societies, the painfully nascent quality of the thoughts and lifestyles that were the norm then, the value of essential goods, the territoriality that comes part and parcel with even the smallest suspicion of prosperity, good old narrative-as-capital, how quickly myths and stories can accumulate momentum, and how anything in abundance, even an exaggeration made universal truth, can be capitalized upon and wrested out of one’s control the moment the story itself becomes an essential, valuable good.

The business of being took up all of his time. There were simply no goals or destinations anymore. Not even the desire to die that he had experienced after the most crushing tragedies of his life. He was just something that kept going. Not because it wanted to, but because the way it had been was how it was built. To keep going, where the bare minimum was the line of least resistance. It was natural, and therefore involuntary.

that’s the whole book, i fear. a western so apparently singular that it bordered on caricature in its subversion. i don’t even know if it teetered over the line; i’ve got no frame of reference beyond film. it’s not entirely devoid of blinks of warmth and tenderness, of something brighter and more layered than the monotony and passivity, and i did feel for those moments—but then they would pass, and what i ended up with were around 200 pages of emotional edging punctuated by adjectives and attributive verbs so intrusive it felt like having your skull bludgeoned in as they piled up. 

still, you gotta admit that humanism is at times only possible through real nihilism, that you can’t confront real nihil more directly than through an aimless track across endless land. when i was reading the first section of trust, it felt like there was something precise and new about loneliness vs. solitude that hernan diaz was close to sliding under a microscope and singling out even in the edith wharton-y descriptions of the rasks’ childhoods and dispositions, and håkan is something of a predecessor to that level of interiority exactly bc he’s its antithesis: a character whose raison d’être is solely the être, and it so happens that the Business Of Being is destined to be done, inevitably, alone, and despite having no animating factor otherwise. 

i still enjoyed seeing håkan’s life backdropped against an america still coming into itself, even if the details were significant only bc you knew what they would become later: the country’s rapid growth into systems and societies, the painfully nascent quality of the thoughts and lifestyles that were the norm then, the value of essential goods, the territoriality that comes part and parcel with even the smallest suspicion of prosperity, good old narrative-as-capital, how quickly myths and stories can accumulate momentum, and how anything in abundance, even an exaggeration made universal truth, can be capitalized upon and wrested out of one’s control the moment the story itself becomes an essential, valuable good.

Dennis Jacob Rosenfeld

So for the first time in a long while a book has me stumped for words. This, my 82nd read in 2018, is a literary masterpiece. This is Hernan Diaz’s first work of fiction which only makes this even more impressive. This is a book about nothing and everything at the same time. A book about the travails of immigration, how countries used to chew people up and spit them out damaged and broken. As they seem to do once again. But most important is the prose. The extraordinary beauty of Diaz’s writing had me writing down paragraph after paragraph of memorable passages. I felt more in touch with humanity while reading this book. I already feel like reading it once more. As should you.

fairly slow moving but v emotional and interesting look at human nature, nature nature, and set in interesting context historical period

Orla Kilroy

fairly slow moving but v emotional and interesting look at human nature, nature nature, and set in interesting context historical period


Karen Shimek

Aaron Lewis

I tore through this sad, strange, mesmerizing story about emptiness, loss, and life, finding it hard to put down each night. It is full of beautiful moments and unfolds as if a dream.

Fleeing from hunger, two young brothers are sent from rural Sweden to seek their fortune in New York in the early 1850s. But in the middle of their long journey they are separated and the younger boy, Hâkan, finds himself alone on a ship bound for California. Hâkan speaks no English and has no money but, determined to find his brother I. inus, he decides to cross America in search of him. The boy, almost immediately, becomes a man ; the man, who never stops growing, becomes a giant ; the giant, despite himself, becomes an outlaw and a legend, known simply as `the Hawk'. Travelling on foot through empty and unclaimed expanses, Hâkan is driven back west over and over again. Moving against the tide of history, he experiences the Gold Rush and its effects, encounters capitalists and colonialiste, explorers and early scientists, and witnesses the formation of America, and the betrayal of its dream. In the Distance is a nova about radical foreignness - about being lost in a country that does not yet exist. Hâkan confronts desert and mountains, the threat of violence and devastating loneliness, all the white keeping the image of his brother, and the hope of companionship, in the distance.

Gary Homewood

A Swedish boy's coming of age quest across 19th century America from San Francisco in search of his brother in New York. Harsh survivalism, folklore mythology and epic loneliness, like the biography of one character in a Cormac McCarthy novel. Sporadic, violent action, and equally as well written and observed passages of the empty repetitiveness of existence in a wilderness.

Jan &
In the Distance by Hernán Díaz

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