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? Is this a brotherly collaboration
or a battle for supremacy?
This is an intricate puzzle of a book by a writer of lyrical power and
formal inventiveness. Against a spectacular backdrop, the heyday of the
greatest showman of them all, Vladislavić unfolds a small, fragmentary
story of family life and the limits of language. Meaning comes into view
in the spaces between then and now, growing up and growing old,
speaking out and keeping silent.