These alone stretches were somewhat slow going for me. For me at least, the long stretches when Hawk is alone in the desert or prairies make for less lively reading than the times when he encounters people along the way. Thus ‘In the Distance’ necessarily is not as tightly plotted as ‘Trust’. Hawk’s encounters with others along the way are sporadic. Ultimately Hawk becomes a legend and is pursued by law enforcement throughout the West. On his long, long lonely trek, Hawk meets up with various individuals and groups of people. Everyone else on the trail is headed in the opposite direction toward the west. Sometimes he walks, sometimes he’s fortunate enough to have a horse or burro. Hawk sets out from the gold rush site near San Francisco, California to go to New York City to hook up with his brother in New York City. While he and his brother Linus were migrating from Sweden, the young man Hawk accidentally got on the wrong ship, one headed around Cape Horn and then going all the way up to California, while Linus presumably got on the right ship headed for New York City. ‘In the Distance’ is the personal history of one Swedish man, Hakan Soderstrom (called Hawk), during the great westward expansion of the United States during the 1850s, fueled by the gold rush in California.īut Hawk is going the opposite way he’s going east. Like ‘Trust’ which deals with the history of Wall Street, ‘In the Distance’ deals with an aspect of United States history in a personal way. ‘In the Distance’ by Hernan Diaz (2017) – 356 pagesĪfter reading and much admiring ‘Trust’, I absolutely had to go back and read the first novel of Hernan Diaz, ‘In the Distance’.

Diaz in the distance