The Distance

<p>In the spring of 1970, a Pretoria schoolboy falls in love with Muhammad<br>Ali. He begins to collect cuttings about his hero from the newspapers,<br>an obsession that grows into a ragged archive of scrapbooks.<br>Forty years later, when Joe has become a writer, these scrapbooks both<br>insist on and obscure a book about his boyhood. He turns to his brother<br>Branko, a sound editor, for help with recovering their shared past. But<br>can a story ever belong equally to two people? Is this a brotherly collaboration<br>or a battle for supremacy?<br>This is an intricate puzzle of a book by a writer of lyrical power and<br>formal inventiveness. Against a spectacular backdrop, the heyday of the<br>greatest showman of them all, Vladislavić unfolds a small, fragmentary<br>story of family life and the limits of language. Meaning comes into view<br>in the spaces between then and now, growing up and growing old,<br>speaking out and keeping silent.</p>