{"product_id":"the-distance-isbn-9781939810762","title":"The Distance","description":"\u003cb\u003eA boxing bildungsroman - a collage of memories, love, resistance, and the spectacle of Muhammed Ali in Apartheid South Africa. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\"\u003ci\u003eThe Distance\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\" \u003cb\u003e --Grace Rajendran, in \u003ci\u003eShelf Awareness\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\"\u003cb\u003e -- \u003ci\u003eKirkus, \u003c\/i\u003eStarred Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e— Daily Mail\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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, \u003ci\u003eThe Distance\u003c\/i\u003e is a searing tale of loss and learning as well as a beautiful evocation of brotherhood during a time of discord.\" \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e— New Welsh Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\"\u003cb\u003e -- Mark Athitakis, \u003ci\u003eOn the Seawall\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A beautifully, thoughtfully crafted novel ... [\u003ci\u003eThe Distance\u003c\/i\u003e] 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.\" — \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Complete Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Violence meets quiet, action edges toward observation, and personality gives way to place. But where \u003ci\u003eThe Distance\u003c\/i\u003e, like \u003ci\u003ePortrait with Keys\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\" — \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eAfrica is a Country\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"One of South Africa's most finely tuned observers.\" - \u003cb\u003eTed Hodgkinson, \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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. \" \u003cb\u003e- Katie Kitamura, \u003ci\u003eBOMB\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"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.\" \u003cb\u003e- Cameron Woodhead, \u003ci\u003eSydney Morning Herald\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eIvan’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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e— Arvind Krishna Mehrotra\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e— J.M. Coetzee\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e— Peter Godwin\u003c\/b\u003eIvan 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Folly\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Restless Supermarket\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePortrait with Keys\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eDouble Negative\u003c\/i\u003e. Among his recent publications are \u003ci\u003eFlashback Hotel\u003c\/i\u003e, a compendium of early stories, and \u003ci\u003eThe Loss Library\u003c\/i\u003e. His work has won several prizes, including the University of Johannesburg Prize, the \u003ci\u003eSunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e 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\u003cbr\u003e intense, unconditional kind of love we call hero worship, was tested in\u003cbr\u003e the new year when Ali fought Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden. I\u003cbr\u003e was at high school in Verwoerdburg, which felt as far from the ringside\u003cbr\u003e as you could get, but I read every scrap of news about the big event and\u003cbr\u003e never for a moment doubted that Ali would win. As it happened, he was\u003cbr\u003e beaten for the first time in his professional career.\u003cbr\u003e It must have been the unprecedented fuss around the Ali vs Frazier\u003cbr\u003e fight that turned me, like so many others who’d taken no interest in\u003cbr\u003e boxing before then, into a fan. ‘The Fight of the Century’ was one of\u003cbr\u003e the first global sporting spectacles, a Hollywood-style bout that captured\u003cbr\u003e the public imagination like no sports event before it. In the words of\u003cbr\u003e reporter Solly Jasven, it was as significant to the Wall Street Journal as\u003cbr\u003e it was to Ring magazine, and it generated what he called the big money\u003cbr\u003e excitement.\u003cbr\u003e I don’t know what I thought of Ali before the Fight of the Century,\u003cbr\u003e but I came from a newspaper-reading family and had started reading a\u003cbr\u003e daily when I was still at primary school, so I must have come across him\u003cbr\u003e in the press, and not just on the sports pages. In March 1967, after he’d\u003cbr\u003e refused to serve in the US army, the World Boxing Association and the\u003cbr\u003e New York State Athletic Commission had stripped him of his world\u003cbr\u003e heavyweight title. This was big news in South Africa, but I cannot say\u003cbr\u003e what impression it made on my nine-year-old self.\u003cbr\u003e Although Ali was absent from the ring for more than three years,\u003cbr\u003e he was not idle: he was on the lecture and talk-show circuit, he appeared\u003cbr\u003e in commercials, he even had a stint in a short-lived Broadway musical\u003cbr\u003e called \u003ci\u003eBuck White\u003c\/i\u003e. In short, he was doing the things celebrities of all\u003cbr\u003e kinds now do as a matter of course to keep their names and faces in\u003cbr\u003e the spotlight and build their ‘brands’. He went from the boxing ring\u003cbr\u003e to the three-ring circus of endorsements and appearances. He was also\u003cbr\u003e speaking in mosques and supporting the black Muslim cause. But very\u003cbr\u003e little of this activity, whether meant in jest or in earnest, was visible from\u003cbr\u003e South Africa.\u003cbr\u003e In 1970, when I was twelve, a Federal court restored Ali’s boxing\u003cbr\u003e licence. His first comeback fight was against Jerry Quarry in Atlanta\u003cbr\u003e and he won on a TKO in the third round. Six weeks later he beat Oscar\u003cbr\u003e Bonavena and that set up the title fight against Frazier in March the\u003cbr\u003e following year. It was a match Frazier had promised him if his boxing\u003cbr\u003e licence was ever returned.\u003cbr\u003e We had no television in South Africa then and our news came from\u003cbr\u003e the radio and the newspapers. The Fight of the Century produced an\u003cbr\u003e avalanche of coverage in the press. My Dad read the daily \u003ci\u003ePretoria News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e and two weeklies, the \u003ci\u003eSunday Times \u003c\/i\u003eand the \u003ci\u003eSunday Express\u003c\/i\u003e, and so these\u003cbr\u003e were my main sources of information. In the buildup to the fight I started\u003cbr\u003e to collect cuttings and for the next five years I kept everything about Ali\u003cbr\u003e that I could lay my hands on, trimming hundreds of articles out of the\u003cbr\u003e broadsheets and pasting them into scrapbooks. Forty years later, these\u003cbr\u003e books are spread out on a trestle table beside my desk as I’m writing this.\u003cbr\u003e Let me also confess: I’m writing this because the scrapbooks exist.\u003cbr\u003e The heart of my archive is three Eclipse drawing books with tracing-\u003cbr\u003e paper sheets between the leaves. These books have buff cardboard\u003cbr\u003e covers printed with the Eclipse trademarks and the obligatory bilingual\u003cbr\u003e ‘drawing book’ and ‘tekenboek’. In the middle of each cover is a handdrawn\u003cbr\u003e title: ALI I, ALI II and ALi III. The newsprint is tobacco-leaf\u003cbr\u003e brown and crackly. When I rub it between my fingers, I fancy that the\u003cbr\u003e boy who first read these reports and I are one and the same person.","brand":"Archipelago","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304173523173,"sku":"NP9781939810762","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781939810762.jpg?v=1767739037","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-distance-isbn-9781939810762","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}