Ingeniously, the author tells the story is a way that helps the reader identify with Håkan’s experience, with no dialogue introduced until later in the story, after he has gained a rudimentary knowledge of English.
Håkan initially does not understand English. In the process, he becomes part of a legend composed of a small amount of truth and a great deal of fabrication.
He encounters people and circumstances that combine to send him wandering around the desert. Not realizing the distance across the continent, he believes he can reunite with his brother by journeying east, sending him against the wave of pioneers traveling west. After losing his brother in the crowded port, Håkan erroneously boards a ship destined for San Francisco rather than New York. Håkan Söderström and his brother Linus set out for America from their native Sweden in the mid-19th century. Hernan Diaz is the author of Borges, Between History and Eternity (Bloomsbury 2012), managing editor of RHM, and associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University. With the double intention of getting away from the trail and the cold, he had traveled south for days. But there were no such travelers-the moving shadows he saw almost every day in the distance were illusions. Had Håkan and his animals ever been spotted, the distant travelers would have taken the vanishing silhouettes for a mirage. He did this each time he thought he spied someone on the circular horizon. At first, it was a contest, but in time the beasts understood that, with an embrace and the slightest push, they had to lie down on their side and stay until Håkan got up. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre (travel narratives, the bildungsroman, nature writing, the Western), offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness. Driven back over and over again on his journey through vast expanses, Håkan meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. He travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great push to the West. "A young Swedish boy finds himself in penniless and alone in California.
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