Hernan Diaz, In the Distance **** 1/2

In the Distance is a Western of sorts, about a Swedish boy who gets separated from his brother en route to New York, ends up in San Francisco, and sets out to cross the country to find his brother. The book is filled with remarkable images, starting on the very first page:

The hole, a broken star on the ice, was the only interruption on the white plain merging into the white sky. No wind, no life, no sound. A pair of hands came out of the water and groped for the edges of the angular hole. It took the searching fingers some time to climb up the thick inner walls of the opening, which resembled the cliffs of a miniature cañon, and find their way to the surface. Having reached over the edge, they hooked into the snow and pulled. A head emerged.

It's our hero, Håkan, who lifts himself from his ice bath and soon dons his "coat made from the skins of lynxes and coyotes, beavers and bears, caribou and snakes, foxes and prairie dogs, coatis and pumas, and other unknown beasts."

Håkan has many adventures, but the most notable thing about his lonely existence is how often it returns to unfeatured landscapes, usually white like the ice, the salt flats, or the mirror he finds reflecting the pitiless sun on the desert.

The tone of the story reminded me of the Jim Jarmusch film Dead Man. It's filled with the tropes of a Western, but they are used in an oblique and allegorical way.