Or is it a mystical parable about a troubled world? Or perhaps an apocalyptic road novel, drenched in blood and fire and thirst? An elaborate homage to the Odyssey (or to Borges’ love of cowboys)? A historical novel about 18th-century migration to the U.S.? The story Håkan tells is a Western, of sorts. In between these encounters, he is forced to rely on his own strength as well as the bounty of the natural world. It introduces him to corrupt wildcat gold miners in California, a naturalist who sets out into the desert in order to prove the shared origin of all things, a huckster who takes advantage of Oregon Trail migrants and a crooked sheriff who drags Håkan across vast Midwestern plains. Numerous obstacles get thrown in the young man’s path his journey oscillates between intense deprivation and unforeseen bounty, over and over and over. Only-surprise, surprise-things don’t quite turn out that way. From the moment he sets foot on land, his mission is clear: he must cross the enormous landmass that separates the Pacific from the Atlantic to find Linus. But the boys get separated in Portsmouth, England, and Håkan winds up in gold rush California instead of New York. He and his older brother Linus are sent off to “Nujårk,” a place that Linus tells Håkan is full of magic, wonder and impossibilities. (The narrator describes the “å” in Håkan as a “u that immediately bled into an o, and then into an a, not in succession, but in a warp or a bend, so that for a moment all three sounds were a single one.”) He’s a Swede named Håkan Söderström, who received his nickname of The Hawk due to the fact that nobody in the United States could pronounce his first name. The man is not, he tells his rapt-if wary-audience, a Native American chief. The ship’s restless crew and passengers gather around a fire as they listen to the life story of a mysterious man around whom rumors swirl.

In the Distance, Hernán Díaz’s debut novel, begins aboard an ice-breaking vessel trapped in ice off the coast of Alaska in the late 1800s.

In the distance hernan diaz