In the Distance by Hernan Diaz — lone star

In The Distance, Hernan Diaz’s extraordinary epic tale of a lone man’s journey into the heart of the American frontier, has many memorable scenes — but one in particular is notable for its sheer incongruity. It is the mid-1800s, in the Utah desert, and Diaz’s anti-hero Hakan Soderstrom has just watched his beloved horse die an agonising death from sand ingestion. Alone, and now on foot, Hakan encounters what appears to be a brilliant mirage, a “frozen blast, a detonation suspended in its flashing climax”. It turns out to be the mirror of a wardrobe abandoned and “disemboweled” on the desert flats, yet there is something “profoundly intimate about it — something conjugal”. Hakan has been wandering haphazardly for months and hasn’t caught sight of himself apart from glimpses in all-too-rare pools of water or reflections on knife blades — suddenly he can see his face completely, and it is a shock. “Some of his old features were gone, new ones had set in, and he had to find himself in the image at his feet.”

It’s a scene that could be a perfect metaphor for those prospectors and settlers, who, from 1850 or so onwards, flooded to America, lured by the promised riches of the gold rush, to be changed forever by the harsh, almost unendurable landscape and an ambition that acquired the desperation of a fever dream.

Hakan’s back-story reflects that of Diaz himself (as a child in the 1970s, Diaz fled Argentina’s dictatorship for Sweden and the US). Born on a farm in rural Sweden, teenage Hakan and his older brother Linus journey alone to England, with the intention of travelling on to America — the destination in their eyes a faraway, fabled city that they call “Nujårk”. By a random twist of fate, the brothers are separated within seconds among the crowds thronging the wharf at Portsmouth harbour. Swept up in the chaos and frantic to find his brother, Hakan boards a ship bound for America, thinking that he will somehow link up again with Linus at the end of the journey in New York. Months later, the ship docks at San Francisco.

Hakan’s dogged determination to cross the continent in search of Linus, travelling east against the relentless tide of immigrants voyaging west, becomes life-long — the ever-more-distant figure of his brother as much a chimera as the shifting desert sands, his compassless trek frustratingly circular. He grows — and grows — from tallish boy, to legendary giant, his own name translated by others as “the Hawk”. Neither Hakan nor the reader can calculate how much time has passed in his wanderings; or which expanses of land he has passed through. Guided by the stars, or the remembrance that his brother once told him that a new sun rises each day, he blends with his surroundings, half-man, half-animal, covering himself with the pelts of the creatures he has killed and eaten in order to survive and protect himself against the freezing winters and devastating summers.

The characters he meets are symbols of the picaresque: the toothless madam smelling of incense and burnt sugar who heads up a violent criminal gang and temporarily imprisons Hakan as a sex slave; the half-crazed naturalist who teaches him vital skills of surgery and healing; a young, pale girl, part of a “massive city” of covered wagons, stirring an unfamiliar tenderness in him before she and her family are subject to a brutal, fatal ambush.

“My intention was to describe a sense of pastness without fetishising that past”, Diaz, an academic at Columbia University, has commented, and he succeeds: the only reference to significant historical incident such as the American civil war, for example, is made when Hakan briefly encounters soldiers merely described as men dressed in blue and grey. Ultimately it is not his quest to be reunited with his brother that impels the novel: it is a good old-fashioned yearning of the human spirit, and a beautifully commodious meditation on its absolute unknowability.

In the Distance , by Hernan Diaz, Daunt, RRP£9.99/Coffee House Press, RRP$16.95, 344 pages

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