![]() ![]() One of the greatest rewards of writing this book was reading most of Muir’s work. Even though I am sure many anachronisms slipped through, with its millions of dated quotations, the unabridged OED was an invaluable resource. I tried to restrict the novel’s lexicon to ordinary words that had been widely in use by 1850, hoping that over the course of the book this would create a certain historical atmosphere that the reader would simply (and involuntarily) feel. The unabridged Oxford English Dictionary.These were some of my sources of inspiration: And for this, my references were not always from the nineteenth century. My main goal was to be inconspicuously accurate.Īll this was in the service of conveying a feeling of vastness and desolation (in the novel, the major events that shaped our country during those years take place just beyond the horizon), of being utterly lost in a monotonous, indifferent landscape. In fact, I did not want the novel to feel researched at all. I steered away from archaisms, colloquialisms, and technical terms, knowing that fetishizing certain words would make the narrator sound like a tourist or an anthropologist. To achieve a reality effect, more than westerns, I read travel narratives and essays by naturalists. In the Distance takes place during the second half of the nineteenth century in what was known, at the time, as the unorganized territories-vast expanses not yet part of the Union. ![]()
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