One of my favourite small publishers.

Even though boxing is not one of my favourite topics, I still found this book to be lovely read. It is beautifully written - almost poetic. A boxing bildungsroman book. And a story of memories, love and resistance in Aparteid South Africa. The story of a boy's obsession with Mohammed Ali.

A lovely read.

Thank yoy fpr sending me this ARC.

Set largely in 1970s apartheid South Africa, this is the story of Joe, a 12-year-old boy, who becomes obsessed with Muhammad Ali and compulsively fills scrapbooks with every news clipping he can find. These scrapbooks later allow Joe and his brother to look back and re-examine their own pasts and that of their country. I found the book an insightful and often moving account of a young boy’s coming-of-age in a troubled era, against a background of racism, not only in South Africa but all round the world. The portrait of Muhammad Ali was far more interesting than I expected it to be, and although I have no interest in or knowledge of boxing I found the insight into the sport surprisingly compelling. There’s so much to enjoy here. At its heart the novel is an exploration of family and especially the relationship between brothers but it is so much more than that – politics, history, sport and its importance, Muhammad Ali himself – all elements combine to make this a really accomplished work of fiction – well-paced, well-written and well-plotted with convincing characterisation and dialogue, with Joe himself being a really memorable protagonist.

How is it that I haven't read Vladislavic before? This book is magnificent. Structurally, linguistically, in terms of form, of narratology, its politics and its emotive power are all rendered with flawless mastery. It's written with a light touch but is freighted with significance that gives it real weight without ever being weighed down by its own importance.

Ostensibly the story of Joe's obsession since the age of 12 with Muhammad Ali, it uses the idea of a boy's scrapbook archive to think about history: of the boxer, of apartheid-era South Africa, of three generations of a family living in Pretoria, of the relationship between two brothers, of the evolution of a book. Boxing is both viscerally literal and yet also serves as a figure for writing and the relationships between author, text and reader; and, through Ali, this also thinks about the politics of sport and, of course, of racial and religious identity.

In writing this, I realise I'm making the book sound ponderous which it really isn't - one of Vladislavic's skills is in making the offshoots cohere and keeping the whole thing marvellously readable. Moments of significance are executed with subtlety: when Joe first realises that 'the absence of black people from places like this, places my cousin and I thought of as ours, was not the natural order of things'; when he first questions America's self-perpetuated image of being 'the bastion of freedom'; when he acknowledges that part of his obsession with Ali was a covert rebellion against his conservative father.

I'm not going to say more as readers deserve to discover the nuances of this book for themselves. Those following my reviews know that I reserve my 5 stars for the truly special, meaningful books - this is one of them.

*Thank you to Net Galley and Archipelago for the advance copy"

In South Africa, two brothers, Joe and Branko, came of age during they heyday of Mohammad Ali. Joe was obsessed with Ali growing up and kept scrapbooks full of clippings from Ali's fights and newsworthy moments. Seeking to write a book about this period of his life, Joe enlists the help of his brother Branko in helping him remember the stories of his youth.

As a fan of Ali, coming of age stories, and novels set in international locations, I was drawn to this book immediately. However, I had a hard time connecting with the material and I made it halfway through this book before calling it quits, It was hard to follow along as the narrators changed (especially since in this Kindle version it is single spaced and easy to miss the name of the narrator between lines.) The information about Ali was too dense and didn't really connect back to Joe. Branko's portion of the story was also complex and, combined with Joe's Ali narrative, made for what felt like a very dry book.

In 'The Distance'’ Joe, a boy from Pretoria, begins to obsessively collect newspaper cuttings about Muhammad Ali (the famous boxer). Forty years later Joe begins writing a book based on his personal archive with the help of his brother Branko. “Over twenty years, I went through the scrapbooks so many times I lost track, intending to write something about them, intrigued anew by what they might reveal of the world I grew up in.”

There is so much to like about this elegant, evocative and elegiac novel by Ivan Vladislavić. It vividly evokes the rapidly changing political and cultural landscape in Africa during the 1970s. This is juxtaposed with Joe’s boyhood and family life in Pretoria. The chapters begin with epigraphs taken from newspapers in the 1970s and mix history with personal events. In this respect, the novel reminded me of Annie Ernaux’s ‘The Years’, which also traces history and collective memory alongside a more personal memoir.

The novel also poses interesting questions about the past both on a collective and a personal level. Branko questions his authority in being able to recount the past. “My brother wants me to tell his story. Or is it mine? Ours? Can a story ever belong equally to two people?’”. That question can be extended to “Can a story belong equally to a nation?”. Here the boxing analogy works well, as personal and national identity are the result of the figurative fight between memory and oblivion. In the end, as the two brothers tell us, “the archive will clarify everything.”

I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

Unfortunately, since this book was not published in the US it is not eligible for the prize, I was interested in the text about Ali that opened the pages, but I did crave more narrative and scene earlier on

<i>The Distance</i> is a fictional account of a family in South Africa told against the backdrop of the great boxer Mohammad Ali, one of the larger than life entertainers of our time. Joe is a bit of a nerd who lives his life through the scrapbooks of his hero, while Branko, his brother, is more practical and wishes he could get Joe to deal with his real life problems. <i>The Distance</i> is the 5th novel by the South African editor and professor Ivan Vladislavić

Joe worships his hero Mohmmad Ali and spends hours of his youth filling scrapbooks with accounts of Ali’s fights, as well as, Ali’s encounters with the global media. Joe becomes a writer and forty years after Ali’s prime, he decides to write a book based on his scrapbook collections, as well as, his life at the time. As this becomes an onerous task, Joe appeals to his brother Branko to help him make sense of it all. Branko’s contributions become short vignettes of a middle-class family growing up in a Pretoria. The result is a series of disconnected stories of the two brothers and their family set against a chronological account of the fights of one of the greatest boxers of that time.

Vladislavić uses beautiful language to take us back to that time in the 1970s and to witness ordinary family life in Pretoria, South Africa. His character descriptions are excellent, particularly of the father and of Joe. They leave you feeling as though you know the characters personally and you can predict how they will behave. This is my favorite part of the book.

I do not like the detail surrounding the description of Mohammad Ali’s career. The Ali story tends to interrupt the flow of the family’s story. The result is a very fragmented book where, in my opinion, one speeds through tedious parts to get back to parts you want to read. I feel as though significant parts of the book are quite dry and tedious.

I recommend this book to people who want to learn details of the Ali fights, although I am not certain this is the purpose of this book. I give it a 2 on 5. I want to thank Net Galley and Steerforth Press for providing me with a digital copy of the novel in exchange for a fair review.