Hernan Diaz

Hernan Diaz understands, and deeply, how strange money is, as an omnipotent and imaginary substance that controls our lives. His novel Trust glints with wonder and knowledge and mystery. Its plotlines are as etched and surreal as Art Deco geometry, while inside that architecture are people who feel appallingly real. This novel is very classical and very original: Balzac would be proud, but so would Borges.

Hernan Diaz is a narrative genius whose work easily encompasses both a grand scope and the crisp and whiplike line. Trust builds its world and characters with subtle aplomb. What a radiant, profound and moving novel.

Though set in a historical New York, Trust speaks to matters of the most urgent significance to the present day. Money, power, class, marital and filial relations, the roles played by trust and betrayal in human affairs—Diaz’s development of his chosen themes is deeply insightful. Cleverly constructed and rich in surprises, this splendid novel offers serious ideas and serious pleasures on every beautifully composed page.

That rare jewel of a book—jaw-dropping storytelling against the backdrop of beautiful writing. Amidst all the noise in the world, whole days found me curled up on the couch, lost inside Diaz’s brilliance.

The audacity and scope of Hernan Diaz’s extraordinary novel— a prism, a mystery, a revelation—are brilliantly matched by the quality of his prose.

In this glorious puzzle of a novel, perspectives keep shifting and the wealth of one early-twentieth-century family keeps changing its origin-story. What a joy this is to read, suspenseful at every turn, the work of a rare and impressive talent. Hernan Diaz has once again taken apart an American myth and pondered how we lie to ourselves.

Sublime, richly layered novel. A story within a story within a story. Elegantly written . . . This is just sublime.

An affecting oddness is the great virtue of In the Distance, along with its wrenching evocations of its main character’s loneliness and grief. And its ability to create lustrous mindscapes from wide-open spaces, from voids that are never empty.

A gorgeously written novel that charts one man’s growth from boyhood to mythic status as he journeys between continents and the extremes of the human condition.

Hernan Diaz explores two kinds of wilderness: the immensely taxing newness of the American West and the still-forming interiority of Håkan, a Swedish immigrant desperate to find a way back home. It’s the second that makes the first feel new. He does this in language that can be plainspoken and wildly, even cosmically, evocative. Håkan’s epic journey reminds us how the self is often hammered into existence by pain and longing. In the end the reader understands the country’s twin potential for horror and hope.

Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance is exquisite: assured, moving, and masterful, as profound and precise an evocation of loneliness as any book I’ve ever read.

Diaz cleverly updates an old-fashioned yarn, and his novel is rife with exquisite moments.

While set in the American West, this is no conventional Western, as it turns the genre’s stereotypes upside down, taking place on a frontier as much mythic as real with a main character. . . . Resonant historical fiction with a contemporary feel.

. . . richly drawn and something like Huckleberry Finn written by Cormac McCarthy: an adventure story as well as a meditation on the meaning of home.

A gritty, dreamy anti-Western Western. This book’s unflinching exposure of our foundational American myths about individualism and violence is so well-executed that it feels nothing short of subversive.

A page-turning adventure story that’s also a profound meditation on solitude and companionship, foreignness and home; a bildungsroman in the grand 19th-century tradition that is also a fierce critique of the romanticised myths of the settlement of the American west.

A western about the conquest of being.

If I could hand you this book I would. Read this. Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance is a portrait of this country as both a dreamscape and a living nightmare. With echoes of John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing, Andrey Platonov’s Soul, and Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, this is fiction at its finest—propulsive, unsettling, wildly ambitious, and an unforgettable journey that we will certainly return to in the years to come.

Hernan Diaz’s strange, absorbing novel In the Distance—the story of Håkan Söderström, a Swedish immigrant whose journey in the American West is fraught with confusion, loss, loneliness and seclusion—upends the romance and mythology of America’s Western experience and rugged individualism.

Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance will haunt me forever, a narrative that continues to astound me, and I think a near perfect portrayal of aloneness and solitude and deep longing.

[In the Distance] is a good old-fashioned yearning of the human spirit, and a beautifully commodious meditation on its absolute unknowability.

An infectious story of one man’s quest for solitude and understanding, In the Distance is a noteworthy, original debut.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize 2018, this strange, sinister tale bewitches, making the wild west of America as intense and otherworldly as any dark myth.

Stitched through with humor, this often-unpredictable novel will keep readers running along with every step of Håkan’s odd escapades.

As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs [Hawk’s] adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. . . . An ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.

Hernan Diaz can spin plates and crack walnuts at the same time. His dazzling novel is a continually unsettling reinvention of American landscape. He offers the treasure of that weird alienated understanding that comes from being a foreigner with roots in Argentina, Sweden and, of course, New York.

One of the best books I’ve read all year.