Book of the Week

In The Distance by Hernan Diaz

Recommended by Mr Pirrie

Now that the excitement of the Booker has died down, and my copy of Shuggie Bain is sitting on a gargantuan pile of others for Christmas reading, I though it might be worthwhile to venture across the pond to America’s pre-eminent award for letters: The Pulitzer. Its roots since 1917 are in journalism and drama, but over the last hundred years it has expanded into a wide range of categories including poetry, criticism, non-fiction and biography to name a few. 

When a friend recommended In The Distance by Hernan Diaz (a finalist for the 2018 Fiction prize) as worthy of belonging to the great tradition of frontier literature my curiosity was piqued; when the novel arrived and a review on the back stated 'It’s as if Herman Melville had navigated the American west, instead of the ocean', I was smitten.
It tells the tale of two brothers who set sail from rural Sweden to seek their fortune in 1850s New York. They become separated with the younger Håkan – 'pronouncing the first vowel as a u that immediately bleeds into an o, and then into an a, not in succession, but in a warp or a bend, so that for a moment all three sounds were a single one' – landing in California and determining to set across an undiscovered and hostile land on foot to re-unite with his brother in New York.

With each step of the journey the Hawk, as he becomes known, grows into a giant, garnering mythical status across the plains of America, but he never stays anywhere for long enough to reap the rewards or the punishments of his actions. Working for explorers and colonialists along the way, the Hawk is forced to track back west before re-setting his course east; a circular pattern emerges enhanced by the lyrical prose, reminiscent of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, with repeated phrasing of landscape and the elements so that the reader cannot help but become hypnotised by the haze and delusion of his quest.

Original and gripping in its own right, In The Distance, pays tribute to the frontier literature of the nineteenth century such as Mark Twain’s Roughing It and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans; but Diaz’s manipulation of form, where minutes can stretch for pages and seasons pass by in a sentence, is disconcerting in its hopelessness and despairing in its effect. It can be difficult to read at times but the beacon of a reunion with his brother in an unforgiving world kept me turning the pages hopefully.

This is our penultimate 'Book of the Week' for the term. The blog's final post, on Tues 15th December, will be our annual round-up of 'Books of the Year'. This post is open to everybody, so if you'd like to contribute and share your enthusiasm for a particular book (or books!) with a wider audience, please feel free to send a couple of lines to: spsbookblog@stpaulsschool.org.uk - deadline Friday 11th December. Many thanks!