"Boxing was never my sport, but the fights look better in the past tense, the distance has given them charm, if not glamour." This line from The Distance by author and professor Ivan Vladislavić (Portrait with Keys) perfectly captures one of the main themes of the novel: the fallibility of memory.
In 1970s Pretoria, young Joe has been obsessively collecting newspaper clippings about his childhood hero, Muhammad Ali. Decades later, he is a novelist ready to use that scrapbook as the starting point of a memoir and enlists the help of his brother, Branko, to help remember details of their shared past. Through their back-and-forth narratives, readers get a peek into the life of an ordinary family in Apartheid-era South Africa, and the Ali fights echo the global politics of that time.
The Distance is a skillfully conducted chorus of language and voices. The brothers' perspectives are joined by the gregarious words of the sportswriters, and Vladislavić gives numerous examples of 1970s Pretorian slang and headlines from South African newspapers. All of this creates a fully immersive literary experience.
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.
In the novel, Branko asks, "Can a story ever belong equally to two people?" This is certainly the book to help ponder that question. --Grace Rajendran, freelance reviewer and literary events producer