The Figure In The Distance - Hardcover

De Kat, Otto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1860468829 ISBN 13: 9781860468827

Publisher: The Harvill Press, 2002

Synopsis

Cambridge, Budapest, New York, Zurich, The Hague, Tel Aviv, the South Downs of England: the narrator has travelled everywhere. He has observed some of the major upheavals of the century - the Six Day War, the Prague Spring - and collected friends, lovers, and passions every step of the way. As he ages, the memories of his past grow sharper, the events of his childhood more vivid - so vivid, in fact, that his present life recedes into oblivion. He inhabits a world of ghosts and shadows and absence. Throughout his perambulations of time and space, one absence always looms largest: that of his father. The figure of his dead father materializes again and again, drawing the narrator back into the past, reviving the people and places of long ago. The Figure in the Distance is a hypnotic novel, told with a cinematic cross-cutting that suspends the reader in the cobwebs of memory and longing that haunt the narrator.

About this title

About the Author

OTTO DE KAT was born in 1946, and studied theology and Dutch literature at Leiden University. Since 1986 he has been the publisher of Uitgeverij Balans in Amsterdam. He has also published a volume of poetry and worked as a literary critic. The Figure in the Distance is his first novel.

From the Back Cover

study of the interplay between past and present. He has a past, but the present eludes him: wherever he goes, the people he sees remind of figures from long ago: a lost friend, a former lover and, above all, his father.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Harvill Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1860468829
• ISBN 13: 9781860468827
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96