The Distance
  • Published: 1 December 2020
  • ISBN: 9781939810762
  • Imprint: Archipelago
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 210
  • RRP: $39.99

The Distance

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

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.
  • Published: 1 December 2020
  • ISBN: 9781939810762
  • Imprint: Archipelago
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 210
  • RRP: $39.99
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Praise for The Distance

Ivan Vladislavic 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. - JM Coetzee

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

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