In the Distance

Starred review from July 3, 2017
In Diaz’s debut, a brilliant and fresh take on the old-school western, a young Swedish immigrant named Håkan is separated from his brother, Linus, en route to America. Håkan lands in San Francisco knowing only that he must get to New York to find Linus, but his journey becomes a series of increasingly dangerous episodes. He becomes a sexual hostage of a saloon owner with “black, gleaming, toothless gums, streaked with bulging veins of pus”; is roped into a kooky naturalist’s search in a dried-out seabed for a jellyfishlike proto-organism that supposedly created mankind; and is forced to kill marauders in self-defense. This latter episode leads to word spreading around the western territory that Håkan is an outlaw legend who literally keeps growing and growing in size, and, indeed, he becomes a giant by the book’s end. Diaz cleverly updates an old-fashioned yarn, and his novel is rife with exquisite moments: Håkan has moving relationships with a horse named Pingo and another traveler named Asa, there’s a drug-induced sequence in which Håkan looks at his own brain, and Håkan’s very limited grasp of English heightens the suspense of his tense encounters. The book contains some of the finest landscape writing around, so potent because it reflects Håkan’s solitude: “Nothing interrupted the mineral silence of the desert. In its complete stillness, the world seemed solid, as if made of one single dry block.”

Starred review from September 1, 2017

After immigrating to America from Sweden in the 1840s, young Hakan Soderstrom is separated from his brother in New York and inadvertently boards a ship bound for California, arriving during the Gold Rush. He befriends a family of Irish immigrants and join them in the goldfields until he is captured by vigilantes, taken to a nearby town, and made a virtual prisoner. Hakan's escape begins many years of adventures across the West. He first falls in with a naturalist who teaches him about science, then with a group of settlers, killing religious zealots who attack their wagon train, becoming a legend--and a wanted man--across the West. While set in the American West, this is no conventional Western, as it turns the genre's stereotypes upside down, taking place on a frontier as much mythic as real with a main character traveling east. In this world, American individualism becomes the isolation that is its shadow and the dream of freedom devolves into anarchic violence. And while Hakan longs for community, he finds himself a stranger everywhere. VERDICT Resonant historical fiction with a contemporary feel.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2017
Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.Hakan Soderstrom is a force of nature, a wild giant whose name, in the frontier America in which he has landed, is rendered as the Hawk. On the docks back in Gothenburg he was separated from his brother, Linus, and he has sworn to find him in a land so big he can scarcely comprehend it. The Hawk lands in California and ventures eastward only to find himself in all kinds of odd company--crooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest man--and a tide of history that keeps pushing him back to the west. Along the way, his exploits, literary scholar Diaz (Hispanic Institute/Columbia Univ.; Borges, Between History and Eternity, 2012) writes, are so numerous that he has become a legend in a frontier full of them; for one thing, says an awe-struck traveler, "He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Just to keep him away." The Hawk protests that most of what has been said about him is untrue--but not all of it. As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs his adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. One fine set piece is a version of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which religious fanatics dressed as Indians attack a pioneer party--save that in Diaz's version, Hakan tears his way across the enemy force with a righteous fury befitting an avenging angel. "He knew he had killed and maimed several men," Diaz writes, memorably, "but what remained most vividly in his mind was the feeling of sorrow and senselessness that came with each act: those worth defending were already dead, and each of his killings made his own struggle for self-preservation less justifiable." Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.

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October 1, 2017
In this curious debut novel, scholar and critic Diaz combines a fastidious attention to historical detail with a playful repurposing of the myth of the American frontier. The saga begins with two emigrating Swedish brothers who lose each other during a transatlantic journey. Linus makes it to New York, but Hakan rounds Tierra del Fuego and winds up in San Francisco. Through a series of increasingly strange episodes, Hakan starts to make a name for himself. First, he convinces a suspicious gold panner to let him tag along, only to be taken hostage by a dangerously alluring mistress. When he makes a run for it, Hakan finds himself taken up by a crackpot biologist, and he joins in the search for a strange, gelatinous organism, a supposed predecessor to humankind. Despite his best efforts, Hakan's quest to reunite with his brother somehow always turns back to this expansive landscape. Stitched through with humor, this often-unpredictable novel will keep readers running along with every step of Hakan's odd escapades.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)