L o n eFour lone letters In an empty space. Adding letters to Lone makes Lone more alone, more lonely.Lone is loss.Lone is forlorn. Lone is lovelorn.Lone is lorn.The lone hero of this book Loses everything, Even his true name.Others call him Hawk.The name Hawk creates fear.Fear creates distance.Distance creates loneliness.Loneliness leads to learning.Learning provides consolation,From the wide sky,From the empty horizon,From pure air and clear water.Lone becomes his only desire,His only dream, H...

This year it is not so much what I read but who I have been reading with. About midway into this existence that is 2020, a group of us on Goodreads decided to start holding monthly zoom meetings. I was skeptical as these are online relationships but craving human contact, I thought it was a good idea. A few months in, the meetings have been wonderful and end up running well past the established time. It is apparent that most of us are missing the time spent in real life book clubs, and after a m...

"Silence and solitude had clouded his perception of time. A year and an instant are equivalent in a monotonous life.".IN THE DISTANCE by Hernan DiazWhen I finished this book last week, I knew I'd read one of the best novels I've come across in years... Maybe in my entire life. It hasn't left my mind since.This tale of Håkan, a young Swedish man coming to the western US in the 1850s is a contemplative story of longing, solitude, strength. The story is deeply allegorical, with writing so pure it b...

4.25ish stars.As pointed out in the publisher's blurb as well as other reviews, this is a hard book to categorize. It's a Western without cowboys. It's a coming-of-age story without much self-discovery. It's a character study without any internal examination. It's historical fiction but feels like it transcends space and time. Which is kind of the point. One of the book’s biggest themes is foreignness and not belonging, so it makes sense that the book itself doesn't quite belong to any genre eit...

Why is the name of the author upside down on the cover there?Because the image is a reverse copy of itself. Not a shimmering reflection in a still lake, but a deliberate perfect mirror with seam undetectable.And neither is this a mere whim of the designer: in Håkan's one permanent home, a warren of burrows beneath the surface of the earth and roofed by pine, an attempt he makes to waterproof a roof section with tarpaulin creates a camera obscura. After securing a few pieces of leather and tar...

This turned out to be a great choice for me. The lead character, Håkan, spends his boyhood in rural Sweden in the mid-19th century. He idolises his older brother Linus, who is protective of him. The boys are supposed to catch an emigrant ship travelling to New York, but they get separated and Håkan mistakenly boards a ship for San Francisco. Arriving in California, he decides to cross the continent to find his brother, but events force him to spend years meandering around the western part of Ame...

Dawn was an intuition, certain yet unseen, and Håkan ran toward it, his eyes fixed on the distant spot that, he was sure, would soon redden, showing him the straight line to his brother. The intense wind on his back was a good omen -- an encouraging hand pushing him forward while also sweeping away his tracks. I adore historical fiction that features a lone, introspective man traveling the American west, encountering violent situations, meeting oddball characters, bedding women of dubious virtue...

This is one of the best books of the year. It's like Cormac McCarthy, except good. Beautiful and suspenseful and alive, with some of the best landscape writing ever ("Nothing interrupted the mineral silence of the desert. In its complete stillness, the world seemed solid, as if made of one single dry block."). Diaz cleverly uses Hakan's lack of English to heighten the tension of the scenes. There's an amazing drug-induced scene in which Hakan looks at his own brain. And perhaps most memorable is...

There are two things I really love about this book - the opportunity to see humanity through the eyes of a nearly feral man of immense tenderness, strength and conscience, and the wonder of Diaz's writing. This is a debut novel that must have spent many years in gestation. I think that the title and the cover capture its essence beautifully - a kind of endless journey that goes everywhere and nowhere. I don't think anyone could finish this book and not feel the most profound love for Hakan. Than...

What a little gem of a novel hidden away in the Tournament of Books longlist. It's a Western in as much as it is set in the "West" but to quote the author from this interview There are many fossilized moments of the Western genre that appear throughout the novel, but I tried to disappoint and go against them. I wanted to write a book that relies on the Western tradition but ultimately subverts it. I found it such a contrast reading this a few months after tackling Lonesome Dove, a literal and fi...

3★I'm wondering if I would have done better with a hard copy. The narrator was too dramatic with his reading for my tastes. Also this may have been a bit too pulitzer-prize-ish for my current reading interests. It was very big on descriptions over long geographical miles and not drawing me in with an emotional connection. It was very authentic and interesting in many passages but in the end I was too tired to appreciate the journey more and felt very distanced.

I resisted everything about this novel in the beginning. I honestly thought it was impossible to believe in. I wrote highly critical marginalia as I read--normally I don't write any marginalia. And then something happened. I gave up, maybe, trying to make the book conform to my expectation. This is the story of a man for whom everything in life goes terribly wrong. He lives out his life in nearly complete isolation from others. He wanders around North America with no sense of where he is, no edu...

One of the best books I’ve read all year. The story, and the narrative voice is completely captivating. At times Diaz gets way too enamored with his talent and goes on and on about some descriptive thing or other but man, the story itself and how it is told is absolutely unforgettable. Imagine the movie The Revenant if it were good.

3.5 stars“Håkan had been traveling away from the past but not into the future. He had remained in a constant present, leaving landscapes and people behind but never heading toward a more or less certain destination that he could foresee.”When I sit down to write a review, I’m often weeks behind with four or five books having been read in the interim. This is at first an obvious disadvantage, as I need to sift through my notes more thoroughly before typing up my thoughts. There is one advantage,

This is an exceptionally well-written book, which might have been close to perfect if it weren't for the odd pacing that haunted its chapters. While entire sections of the book were given to the description of a recipe or the unhealthy state of a horse's colon, the majority of the story's main turning points were limited to only one or two paragraphs. One particular section - the battle between a group of settlers and a band of mysterious 'brethren' - should have been fascinating, but in fact wa...

4.25 stars. This is a one-of-a-kind original American Western. No cowboys; fake Indians. While the stage coaches are headed West to the California Gold Rush, our protagonist Håkan is headed East, to New York. Sort of an anti-Western.He had come from Sweden in 1850 with his older brother, but took the wrong ship from England, bound for California instead by way of Buenos Aires. Now all he wants to do is cross the Continental U.S. to get to NY where he assumes is his brother. But many years pass,