The Distance

In the spring of 1970, a Pretoria schoolboy falls in love with Muhammad Ali. He begins to collect cuttings about his hero from the newspapers, an obsession that grows into a ragged archive of scrapbooks. Forty years later, when Joe has become a writer, these scrapbooks both insist on and obscure a book about his boyhood. He turns to his brother Branko, a sound editor, for help with recovering their shared past. But can a story ever belong equally to two people?
     Against a spectacular backdrop, the heyday of the greatest showman of them all, Vladislavić unfolds a small, fragmentary story of family life and boyish ambition, illuminating the origins of a writing life and the limits of language.

The Distance
Archipelago Books, 2020
ISBN 978-1-939810-76-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-939810-77-9 (ebook)
More at archipelago books.org

 

 

 

The Distance cover thumbThe Distance
Umuzi, 2019
ISBN 978-1-4152-1026-0
More at www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za

 

 

 

 

EXTRACT

Joe is reading the Bible. He started at ‘In the beginning …’ and he plans to go all the way through to the last ‘Amen’. He’s been busy for five or six months and he’s got as far as the First Book of the Chronicles. Every night, unless we’ve come in late from the cycle track or he’s listening to Malcolm Gooding’s music show on the transistor, he kneels down next to his bed and says his prayers. Then he creeps under the blankets, takes the Bible from his bedside table, opens it at the bookmark, which is shaped like a shepherd’s crook and has a picture of St Christopher on it, and reads two pages. Neither more nor less. This way he’s calculated it will take him eighteen months to get to the end.
     Joe is a great reader, as they say. In the school holidays, he lies on his bed in the sun all day and reads like a machine. He can devour a book in a day, five books, if you count the Reader’s Digest condensed volumes, which he swallows like an astronaut eating five square meals in tablet form.
     Why don’t you just read the Bible in one go? I ask. That time you had measles you got through Riders of the Purple Sage without stopping to water the horses. You could do one hundred pages of scripture a day and still have time for a couple of chapters of Leslie Charteris. Ten days and it would all be over. Two weeks at a stretch.
     I can’t do that, he says. The whole point is to read it in stages.
     Like the Tour de France?
     Ja, exactly. You can’t sommer beetle on to the end. You’ve got to do one stage a day like everybody else.
     There’s another rule, I discover: no skipping. He has to read every chapter of every book. Not just Exodus and Proverbs, but Nehemiah and Amos and Nahum. Nahum. Who the hell reads him? Every verse of every chapter too and every word of every verse. All the begats and comings to pass, all the instances of this one saying unto that one and that one arising and going forth, all the lists of the sons of the one and the brethren of the other. He says that’s the best part, the lineages. He’s making a list of all the main manne – he waves a blue exercise book – and that’s why he’s got stuck for two weeks in the First Book of the Chronicles.
     All of them? I say. You’re making a list of all the Sons of Adam?
     No, he says, only the good okes.

Sources

The Distance quotes from a collection of newspaper and magazine cuttings made between 1971 and 1975. Many of the sources are named in the text, but not all could be identified with certainty. The following list includes the known details and best guesses.

Access the full list here

TRANSLATIONS

 

La distanza.Utopia Editore

La distanza
Utopia Editore, 2023
ISBN 979-12-80084-67-5
More info here

 

 

 

 

 

Schlagabtausch
Wagenbach, 2020
ISBN 978-3-8031-3320-5
More at www.wagenbach.de

 

 

 

 

 

DistanceDistance
Éditions Zoé, 2020
ISBN 978-2-88927-806-0
More at www.editionszoe.ch

 

Read 12356 times
back to top

Other Writing

  • L'insieme delle parti published by Utopia

     Utopia Editore in Torino have published an Italian translation of The Exploded View under the title L'insieme delle parti. The translator is Carmen Concilio.

    More here

  • 'Time-Travelling in the Archive' in Publishing from the South

    Publishing from the South: A Century of Wits University Press is edited by Sarah Nuttall and Isabel Hofmeyr and published by WUP. Featuring contributions from scholars, publishers and authors, this multi-voiced volume offers a deep dive into the history, sociology and politics of the oldest South African university press. It explores the strategies deployed to professionalise global South knowledge making and supports the scholarly missions of their universities.

    More here

  • 'In Passing' in Walking as Embodied Research

    In recent years, walking has emerged as a methodological tool and as a conceptually exciting point of departure across a range of disciplines and practices. This volume explores walking as a form of embodied research practice that offers fresh perspectives on key contemporary debates and areas of interest. These include the climate emergency and the debate around the Anthropocene, decolonial thinking and the struggle for social justice, feminist and queer walking methodologies, and the notion of the ‘infraordinary’ and practices of everyday life. Walking as Embodied Research: Drift, Pause, Indirection is edited by Christian Ernsten and Nick Shepherd and published by Routledge.

    More here

  • La Lecture published by Éditions Elyzad

    The Tunisian imprint Elyzad has published a French translation of Vladislavić's story 'The Reading' as a separate volume. The text, which appeared in the collection 101 Detectives, is translated by Georges Lory.

    More here

  • Peter Beilharz Festschrift: 'Three Lectures'

    On the occasion of his 70th birthday, friends and colleagues of Peter Beilharz celebrate his work and friendship in articles and other reflections. The texts make up a special issue of Thesis Eleven, the journal he co-founded in 1980.

    Full issue here