The Distance

A boxing bildungsroman - a collage of memories, love, resistance, and the spectacle of Muhammed Ali in Apartheid South Africa. 

In the spring of 1970, a Pretoria schoolboy, Joe, becomes obsessed with Muhammad Ali. He begins collecting daily newspaper clippings about him, a passion that grows into an archive of scrapbooks. Forty years later, when Joe has become a writer, these scrapbooks become the foundation for a memoir of his childhood. When he calls upon his brother, Branko, for help uncovering their shared past, meaning comes into view in the spaces between then and now, growing up and growing old, speaking out and keeping silent."The Distance is a skillfully conducted chorus of language and voices. . . Vladislavić deftly alternates between the two narrators with a speed that, in the hands of a lesser linguist, could leave readers with verbal whiplash but, in this case, serves to highlight the fact that even shared memories can be vastly different. . . This contemplative coming-of-age story set in Apartheid-era South Africa is juxtaposed with the iconic Muhammad Ali fights."  --Grace Rajendran, in Shelf Awareness

"South African novelist Vladislavić delivers a moving, closely observed study in family dynamics in a time of apartheid...Vladislavić's tale unfolds with grace and precision. A memorable, beautifully written story of love and loss." -- Kirkus, Starred Review

"This bittersweet story of hero worship and political awakening has a pole-axing sting in the tail. It focuses on two brothers, Joe and Branko, growing up white in Seventies South Africa...We cut between the two men in name-tagged segments that mingle recollections of adolescent longing with sharply observed scenes of their hesitant relationship as adults..In this instantly engaging novel, told in thoughtful but direct style, all the cleverness is under the bonnet." — Daily Mail

"Set in apartheid South Africa, this allegory of boxing, blood and brotherhood ripples with meanings and possibilities...In a country where language is profoundly, and knottily, connected to race and power, it is also a bulwark, and an escape...Full of grace and tenderness, The Distance is a searing tale of loss and learning as well as a beautiful evocation of brotherhood during a time of discord." — New Welsh Review

"Boxing is just one example of the kinds of opposing forces that Vladislavić explores with wit and sensitivity in this book: fact versus fiction, boyhood versus adulthood, masculinity versus machismo, apartheid versus freedom, and, most potently, brother versus brother." -- Mark Athitakis, On the Seawall

"A beautifully, thoughtfully crafted novel ... [The Distance] seeks to engage the reader -- subtly, but in astonishingly many different ways, on questions about everything from race to how one can present narratives, from capturing a boxing match to attempts at autobiography to the films Branko's son is experimenting with. Vladislavić again shows himself to be an exceptional writer -- and this, as perhaps his most readily accessible work (though in fact it is many layers deep), is a good introduction to his work." — The Complete Review

"Violence meets quiet, action edges toward observation, and personality gives way to place. But where The Distance, like Portrait with Keys before it, asks that the reader build links across and between planes of memory, history, and city, the virtual world with which the book’s past collides is discomfitingly edgeless. Vladislavic is an auteur of this moment of collision. Always hovering just askew of the city he loves, his is a voice for making new spaces within it." — Africa is a Country

"One of South Africa's most finely tuned observers." - Ted Hodgkinson, Times Literary Supplement

"The writing has a quality of unpredicitability, a wildness that seeps through the fabric of Vladislavic's peerless linguistic control. Ivan Vladislavic is one of the most significant writers working in English today. Everyone should read him. " - Katie Kitamura, BOMB

"The Distance is a moving, sharply observed novel confronting questions of race, memory and forgetting, underlain by the necessity and difficulty of wrestling the past into story." - Cameron Woodhead, Sydney Morning Herald
Ivan’s sentences are like no one else’s; how does he manage to do it? They rise in the air like balloons and never seem to come down. One reads them looking up.
— Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Ivan Vladislavić occupies a place all of his own in the South African literary landscape: a versatile stylist and formal innovator whose work is nevertheless firmly rooted in contemporary urban life.
— J.M. Coetzee

Ivan Vladislavić manages to mine southern African ore for the universal gem, delivering it in magical, lapidary prose. He fulfills every writer’s hope, as W.H. Auden put it, "to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere."
— Peter GodwinIvan Vladislavic is a novelist, essayist, and editor. He lives in Johannesburg where he is a Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand. His books include The Folly, The Restless Supermarket, Portrait with Keys, and Double Negative. Among his recent publications are Flashback Hotel, a compendium of early stories, and The Loss Library. His work has won several prizes, including the University of Johannesburg Prize, the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, and the Alon Paton Award for non-fiction. In 2015, He was awarded Yale University's Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.In the spring of 1970, I fell in love with Muhammad Ali. This love, the
intense, unconditional kind of love we call hero worship, was tested in
the new year when Ali fought Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden. I
was at high school in Verwoerdburg, which felt as far from the ringside
as you could get, but I read every scrap of news about the big event and
never for a moment doubted that Ali would win. As it happened, he was
beaten for the first time in his professional career.
It must have been the unprecedented fuss around the Ali vs Frazier
fight that turned me, like so many others who’d taken no interest in
boxing before then, into a fan. ‘The Fight of the Century’ was one of
the first global sporting spectacles, a Hollywood-style bout that captured
the public imagination like no sports event before it. In the words of
reporter Solly Jasven, it was as significant to the Wall Street Journal as
it was to Ring magazine, and it generated what he called the big money
excitement.
I don’t know what I thought of Ali before the Fight of the Century,
but I came from a newspaper-reading family and had started reading a
daily when I was still at primary school, so I must have come across him
in the press, and not just on the sports pages. In March 1967, after he’d
refused to serve in the US army, the World Boxing Association and the
New York State Athletic Commission had stripped him of his world
heavyweight title. This was big news in South Africa, but I cannot say
what impression it made on my nine-year-old self.
Although Ali was absent from the ring for more than three years,
he was not idle: he was on the lecture and talk-show circuit, he appeared
in commercials, he even had a stint in a short-lived Broadway musical
called Buck White. In short, he was doing the things celebrities of all
kinds now do as a matter of course to keep their names and faces in
the spotlight and build their ‘brands’. He went from the boxing ring
to the three-ring circus of endorsements and appearances. He was also
speaking in mosques and supporting the black Muslim cause. But very
little of this activity, whether meant in jest or in earnest, was visible from
South Africa.
In 1970, when I was twelve, a Federal court restored Ali’s boxing
licence. His first comeback fight was against Jerry Quarry in Atlanta
and he won on a TKO in the third round. Six weeks later he beat Oscar
Bonavena and that set up the title fight against Frazier in March the
following year. It was a match Frazier had promised him if his boxing
licence was ever returned.
We had no television in South Africa then and our news came from
the radio and the newspapers. The Fight of the Century produced an
avalanche of coverage in the press. My Dad read the daily Pretoria News
and two weeklies, the Sunday Times and the Sunday Express, and so these
were my main sources of information. In the buildup to the fight I started
to collect cuttings 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. Forty years later, these
books are spread out on a trestle table beside my desk as I’m writing this.
Let me also confess: I’m writing this because the scrapbooks exist.
The heart of my archive is three Eclipse drawing books with tracing-
paper sheets between the leaves. These books have buff cardboard
covers printed with the Eclipse trademarks and the obligatory bilingual
‘drawing book’ and ‘tekenboek’. In the middle of each cover is a handdrawn
title: ALI I, ALI II and ALi III. The newsprint is tobacco-leaf
brown and crackly. When I rub it between my fingers, I fancy that the
boy who first read these reports and I are one and the same person.