In the Distance in Reading with Style

Dec 06, 2017 Megan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical-fiction, fiction

A Swedish boy is separated from his older brother--and everything about the life he knew--when he boards the wrong ship and ends up in San Francisco. He decides to make his way eastward across the country, where he can reunite with his brother in their intended destination of New York. And so he criss-crosses the American west, and in the process, he finds himself, loses himself, and becomes a legend to others.

I loved the prose, so clear and imaginative. In particular, there were such riches of A Swedish boy is separated from his older brother--and everything about the life he knew--when he boards the wrong ship and ends up in San Francisco. He decides to make his way eastward across the country, where he can reunite with his brother in their intended destination of New York. And so he criss-crosses the American west, and in the process, he finds himself, loses himself, and becomes a legend to others.

I loved the prose, so clear and imaginative. In particular, there were such riches of living, breathing description; no setting was neutral, and without being overbearing, Diaz depicted the the mental, emotional, and physical effects of any given landscape in graceful writing. There are some other neat literary techniques at work--for example, how Håkan interpreted early interactions and encounters before he learned English--but in the end, it's the descriptions of setting that I keep thinking about, that I'm still really impressed by:

He was sick of the sun and would often lie on his stomach, drowsy and almost feverish from the stale air under the low-hanging skins and canvases, to avoid its sight. Still, it would pierce through his refuge and bore into his skull, igniting all the past suns that had hunted down and degraded him and everyone else he had met throughout his journey—the sun, deceitful in Portsmouth, implacable over Brennan's mine, cold-hearted against his Clangston window, shrieking across the salt lake, complicit through a wagon's bonnet, excessive when unwanted, and far from its creatures when most needed.

And those setting descriptions are the vehicle for Håkan's emotional experience. In the Distance is an immigrant story and a western, yep, but it's the coming-of-age story, the growth of Håkan, that made this book a standout for me. It's all about the experience of Håkan experiencing and interpreting the natural world and the social world, and how these two worlds hurt him, shaped him, challenged him, frightened him, made him. And how those two worlds intersect and separate. How being taken under the wing of a naturalist, Håkan learned the skills to learn from the world, to understand what he could about its mechanics, to feel the connections between all living things, to honor that. How retreating from civilization because of the monstrousness he thought himself the bearer of, how that showed just how wonderfully and painfully human Håkan was, how more civilized he was than those who drove him to that point.

Ultimately, even more so than Håkan's encounters with an alien landscape or another person with unknown motives, it's his own encounters with himself, with the contours of his own identity and his own heart, that form the cornerstone of the book. Håkan was just a boy when he set out from Sweden. Since then, he lived feral and scared and strange in a land already full of strangers. There are so many wonderful moments of human recognition--evaluations on how he changed and discovering shifts in his foundations, the experience of being believed after experiencing only waves of lies about himself, the scene where he sits safely with a beloved friend and experiences indignation for the first time--that give this book its quiet power.

I can't completely restrain myself from quoting too much of this book, so here's one of my favorite passages, where a young Håkan learns about dissection and life from his naturalist mentor Lorimer, and first encounters some of the guiding principles of his life:

During their lessons, Lorimer often reminded his student that his remarkable talent with the scalpel would amount to nothing if the knife was not held by a loving hand guided by a truth-seeking eye. The study of nature is a barren enterprise if stones, plants, and animals become frozen under the magnifying glass, Lorimer said. A naturalist should look at the world with warm affection, if not ardent love. The life the scalpel has ended ought to be honored by a caring, devoted appreciation for that creature's unrepeatable individuality, and for the fact that, at the same time, strange as this may seem, this life stands for the entire natural kingdom. Examined with attention, the dissected hare illuminates the parts and properties of all other animals and, by extension, their environment. The hare, like a blade of grass or a piece of coal, is not simply a small fraction of the whole but contains the whole within itself. This makes us all one. If anything, because we are all made of the same stuff. Our flesh is the debris of dead stars, and this is also true of the apple and its tree, of each hair on the spider's legs, and of the rock rusting on planet Mars. Each minuscule being has spokes radiating out to all of creation. Some of the raindrops falling on the potato plants in your farm back in Sweden were once in a tiger's bladder. From one living thing, the properties of any other may be predicted. Looking at any particle with sufficient care, and following the chain that links all things together, we can arrive at the universe—the correspondences are there, if the eye is skillful enough to detect them. The guts of the anatomized hare faithfully render the picture of the entire world. And because that hare is everything, it is also us. Having understood and experienced this marvelous congruity, man can no longer examine his surroundings merely as a surface scattered with alien objects and creatures related to him only by their usefulness. The carpenter who can only devise tabletops while walking through the forest, the poet who can only remember his own private sorrows while looking at the falling snow, the naturalist who can only attach a label to every leaf and a pin to every insect—all of them are debasing nature by turning it into a storehouse, a symbol, or a fact. Knowing nature, Lorimer would often say, means learning how to be. And to achieve this, we must listen to the constant sermon of things. Our highest task is to make out the words to better partake in the ecstasy of existence.

Håkan had been converted.

I thought a lot about one of my other favorite books this year, C.E. Morgan's The Sport of Kings, in conversation with not just this passage but the whole book, about the mythology of America and self-made power, and the literal land and animals of our lives, about the lives that stretch out beyond us. I'm so glad to have read In the Distance, and I'm thankful the Tournament of Books 2018 longlist brought this book to me. ...more

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