Distance

Distance Synopsis

In the spring of 1970, a Pretoria schoolboy falls in love with MuhammadAli. 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 bothinsist on and obscure a book about his boyhood. He turns to his brotherBranko, a sound editor, for help with recovering their shared past. Butcan a story ever belong equally to two people? Is this a brotherly collaborationor a battle for supremacy?This is an intricate puzzle of a book by a writer of lyrical power andformal inventiveness. Against a spectacular backdrop, the heyday of thegreatest showman of them all, VladislaviA unfolds a small, fragmentarystory of family life and the limits of language. Meaning comes into viewin the spaces between then and now, growing up and growing old,speaking out and keeping silent.