Borges, Between History and Eternity, 2012) writes, are so numerous that he has become a legend in a frontier full of them for one thing, says an awe-struck traveler, “He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Along the way, his exploits, literary scholar Diaz (Hispanic Institute/Columbia Univ.
The Hawk lands in California and ventures eastward only to find himself in all kinds of odd company-crooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest man-and a tide of history that keeps pushing him back to the west. On the docks back in Gothenburg he was separated from his brother, Linus, and he has sworn to find him in a land so big he can scarcely comprehend it.
Håkan Söderström is a force of nature, a wild giant whose name, in the frontier America in which he has landed, is rendered as the Hawk.
In its complete stillness, the world seemed solid, as if made of one single dry block.” (Oct.Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel García Márquez. The book contains some of the finest landscape writing around, so potent because it reflects Håkan’s solitude: “Nothing interrupted the mineral silence of the desert. Diaz cleverly updates an old-fashioned yarn, and his novel is rife with exquisite moments: Håkan has moving relationships with a horse named Pingo and another traveler named Asa, there’s a drug-induced sequence in which Håkan looks at his own brain, and Håkan’s very limited grasp of English heightens the suspense of his tense encounters. This latter episode leads to word spreading around the western territory that Håkan is an outlaw legend who literally keeps growing and growing in size, and, indeed, he becomes a giant by the book’s end. He becomes a sexual hostage of a saloon owner with “black, gleaming, toothless gums, streaked with bulging veins of pus” is roped into a kooky naturalist’s search in a dried-out seabed for a jellyfishlike proto-organism that supposedly created mankind and is forced to kill marauders in self-defense. Håkan lands in San Francisco knowing only that he must get to New York to find Linus, but his journey becomes a series of increasingly dangerous episodes. In Diaz’s debut, a brilliant and fresh take on the old-school western, a young Swedish immigrant named Håkan is separated from his brother, Linus, en route to America.
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