The Distance

July 1, 2020
South African novelist Vladislavic delivers a moving, closely observed study in family dynamics in a time of apartheid. Like the author, Joe and Branko Blahavic are the descendants of a Croatian migrant who landed in South Africa and stayed, of which their father remarks, "He knew people in Pretoria. That's what immigrants do. They find some connection to help them out until they're on their feet." Joe would rather be by the sea than in the waterless Transvaal, but, around the time of the Fight of the Century--the 1971 smackdown between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier--he contents himself with keeping elaborate scrapbooks devoted to The Champ: "In the buildup to the fight I started to collect cuttings," says Joe, "and for the next five years I kept everything about Ali that I could lay my hands on, trimming hundreds of articles out of the broadsheets and pasting them into scrapbooks." Joe and Branko's childhood closeness widens in adolescence and adulthood, but the distance of which Vladislavic writes comes in many forms: that of the immigrants from an apartheid society, that of families as the children grow up and move away, in Joe's case to America, where he becomes a writer. Joe returns to South Africa but suffers a bad end, leaving it to Branko to reconstruct his brother's life through those scrapbooks and complete the book Joe has been contracted to write about them. "Scenes from our childhood flicker to life and I write them down as they come. That's something he taught me: thinking about writing is not the same as actually doing it," Branko says, later texting Joe's editor, "Btw the book is not actually about Ali." Indeed it's not, though the boisterous Ali is a leitmotif. It helps to know a little South African patois ("Going to the rofstoei on a Saturday night is a big thing for two teenage boys, especially when we don't have to take care of the lighties"), but allowing for a few linguistic puzzles, Vladislavic's tale unfolds with grace and precision. A memorable, beautifully written story of love and loss.

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Starred review from October 5, 2020
A childhood obsession with Muhammad Ali informs the life of a South African writer in Vladislavic’s dazzling, deeply felt meditation on cultural identity and anxiety (after Flashback Hotel). In anticipation of Ali’s first fight with Joe Frazier in 1971, 12 year-old Joe, who is white, creates the first of several scrapbooks dedicated to his hero. The scrapbooks document five years of Ali’s fights and epic celebrity evoking the colorful blow-by-blow prose of pre-television sportswriters, conjuring for Joe an America as mythical as it is distant. While the racial and political conflicts swirling around Ali are greatly relevant in apartheid-era Pretoria, Joe is as much stirred by the fighter’s language, physical beauty, and otherworldly charisma. “He was a floating poem itself,” Joe reflects in the present, “an animate, explosive piece of pop verse, a sprung rhythm.” Joe and his dismissive older brother, Branko, trade narration in alternating sections, recalling their adolescent trials in love, friendship, and family, until tragedy strikes and one brother is left holding the unfinished manuscript they’d worked on together. Vladislavic inserts actual newspaper cuttings into the narrative, which are cited and set in gray text, making this a remarkable ode to the written and spoken word, filled with fascinating and moving metaphysical interventions. The result is an extraordinary palimpsest of pulp reporting, cultural anthropology, and personal diary.