Event Date
20 February 2019
Venue
Love Books, Johannesburg
Penguin Random House and Love Books invite you to the launch of The Distance :
Ivan Vladislavić will be in conversation with Michele Magwood.
Date: Wednesday, 20 February 2019
Time: 18:00 for 18:30
Venue: Love Books
Address: The Bamboo Lifestyle Centre, 53 Rustenburg Road, Melville
RSVP: kate@lovebooks.co.za / 011 726 7408
About the book:
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.