The Figure In The Distance

Otto De Kat

qer 2011 · Random House

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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.

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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.

Arnold J. Pomeran's translations include works by Louis de Broglie, Anne Frank, Sigmund Freud, George Grosz and Jan Huizinga. He was awarded the PEN translation prize for his translation from Dutch and French of The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.

Erica Pomerans has worked with her husband on more than 40 titles as editor and translator.