In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
Published 2017 · 256 pages · 78,996 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is In the Distance to read?
In the Distance scores 63 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Diaz writes in crisp, precise English that draws heavily on the physical world—geological, anatomical, and naturalist vocabulary surfaces throughout (charqui, cañon, bibelots, gewgaw, epaulettes, aiguillettes, marquetry). The register stays consistent: neither ornate nor plain, it has the quality of translation—careful, exact, slightly formal. Readers encounter unfamiliar terms from period and craft but never face linguistic performance.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Sentences tend to be long and cumulative, piling subordinate clauses with a quiet confidence that recalls nineteenth-century prose. Diaz favors inventories and extended descriptions—lists of objects, animals, actions—that build texture without obscuring meaning. The syntax is stately rather than convoluted; it asks for patience rather than puzzlement.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- The novel stays grounded in the physical: weather, wounds, hunger, the exact mechanics of a horse surgery or a coat made of stitched pelts. Abstract ideas—language, belonging, the ethics of violence—enter through action and object rather than discourse. When Lorimer delivers his speeches about matter and immortality, they feel like interruptions in an otherwise concrete world.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Each chapter covers large stretches of time and terrain with economical precision; the novel never lingers long enough to become saturated. Lorimer's lectures on natural history, the embedded mythology of the Hawk, and Håkan's silent observations all carry conceptual weight. But Diaz spaces these doses out, and the clean prose prevents accumulation from becoming overload.
- Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
- The novel's meaning lives beneath its surface. Håkan barely speaks and never explains himself; readers must infer his inner life from what he notices, touches, or avoids. The frame—an old man talking to a campfire—withholds its revelations incrementally, and the gap between the Hawk legend (monstrous) and Håkan's actual experience (bewildered, gentle) must be assembled by the reader without authorial guidance.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- Diaz loads his landscape with silent significance: the coat Håkan builds from every animal he encounters becomes a map of his journey and an armor against language; the compass points east but Håkan can never reach east; mirrors appear at pivotal moments when Håkan must reckon with his own face and identity. The desert itself functions as a symbolic field—blank, inhospitable, mirroring his estrangement from the world. These symbols accumulate without announcement.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- The Hawk myth—circulating as tabloid horror—runs against Håkan's actual experience as a frightened, linguistically marooned boy. This gap is ironic, but Diaz plays it straight rather than winking. The novel generates its irony structurally, through juxtaposition, not through authorial commentary. There is no satirical apparatus; the distance between legend and truth is left for the reader to measure.
- Resolution withholding: 75 out of 100
- The ending refuses resolution in any conventional sense. The central longing—reunion with Linus—goes unfulfilled. The final scene dissolves Håkan into whiteness with an image that is more gesture than conclusion. Questions about his guilt, his fate, and whether he ever finds peace remain unanswered. The novel ends as it began: with a body moving through an empty white expanse, destination unknown.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- The novel uses a frame narrative—an old man on an icebound ship telling his life story to a boy—then shifts into chronological chapters covering decades of wandering. The numbered chapters (1, 2, 3... 24, 27) suggest gaps and omissions; we never read the missing chapters. The frame encloses the life story without quite explaining it, and the structure implies that much of the most important material has been skipped over.
How In the Distance is regarded
In the Distance holds a literary regard score of 49 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.