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The Figure In The Distance
The Figure In The Distance
May 9, 2025 11:17 PM

Author:Otto De Kat

The Figure In The Distance

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.

Reviews

Titus Awakes is a treasure salvaged from the ruins

—— New Statesman

Peake does not, as some have said, defy classification; rather, he is beyond classification in any single genre, and therein perhaps lies his genius. In his centenary year it is to be hoped that the latest surge of interest in his enormous range of work will finally help to place him in his rightful position as one of Britain's most brilliant, original and creative figures

—— Times Literary Supplement

A century after his birth, the gothic surrealism of Peake's fantasy world still attracts new fans

—— Independent

He can write, at will, like a modern Henry James, proceeding with composure through the labyrinth

—— Literary Review

Like all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious

—— Terry Eagleton , Stand

Paul Durcan has a great comic gift

—— Colb Toibin , Sunday Independent

By universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner is now recognised as the strongest American novelist of the century, clearly surpassing Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry James

—— Harold Bloom

His mind to him a kingdom was; or rather, a county, Yoknapatawpha. He breathed on it and gave it life, a luminous world of rustics, comic and sinister, of inchoate historical processes and tragic human beings, earning dignity by endurance

—— Independent
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