Like the Appearance of Horses

March 27, 2023
Krivak revisits the Vinich family, whose travails he has portrayed in two earlier novels including The Signal Flame, for a bleak and stirring work that revolves around a pair of soldiers fighting separate wars. The first is Becks Konar, a young Hungarian and Roma man who leaves Hungary for the United States in 1933 and arrives at Jozef Vinich’s 2,000-acre homestead in Dardan, Pa., Jozef having saved his life as an orphaned infant during WWI. After marrying Jozef’s daughter, Becks returns to Europe to fight for his adopted country in WWII. His thrilling journey to join a resistance movement after being separated from his unit in the Ardennes is the novel’s highlight. The second soldier is Sam Konar, Becks’s younger son, who enlists in the Marines in the 1960s and goes missing in action in Vietnam. Two years later, he returns home broken, addicted to heroin, and pained to discover his older brother is engaged to his former girlfriend. While Krivak handles Sam’s tale with skill, his section feels less mythic and haunting than Becks’s epic journey (as Jozef tells Becks, “no land, no country, no nation will let us wander within its borders without exacting its price”). Krivak impresses with this layered story of deferred homecomings and the elusive nature of peace.

Starred review from April 13, 2023

This haunting novel from Krivak (The Bear) leaves the reader with a visceral experience of little-told history, sometimes alluded to, but seldom encountered. Bexhet (Becks) Konar is a half Roma boy fleeing from fascist death squads in Hungary. He arrives in America seeking refuge with Joseph Vinich, who saved his mother from death during World War I. Becks marries Vinich's daughter before going off to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, in the ensuing chaos becoming a partisan highly skilled at killing Arrow Cross fascists. After the war he is imprisoned for desertion but is finally released, only to die in a tragic accident. One of Becks's sons then goes to Vietnam and one of his grandsons to Afghanistan. Each section of the novel focuses on a separate generation of the family descendants engaging in the conflicts that defined them. Beck's son Sam's experience as a POW in Vietnam and his heroin addiction is particularly arresting. VERDICT This intensely readable whopper of a book provides a nuanced perspective on the human struggle to survive war through the lens of Hungary and the Roma people. The mystical connection to family and nature across space and time in the form of a bear provides a special twist. Highly recommended.--Henry Bankhead

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Starred review from April 1, 2023
Krivak examines war's effect on one family. This book follows several generations of one family--as well as a few others in their orbit--from the aftermath of World War I into the early days of the 21st century. It's the final book in a trilogy, following The Sojourn (2011) and The Signal Flame (2017), but it can be read alone. The narrative moves backward and forward in time, which seems fitting for a novel in which the past looms as large as it does here. It opens in the 1930s, with Jozef Vinich, protagonist of The Sojourn, living in Pennsylvania with his wife, Helen, and daughter, Hannah. A boy with ties to Jozef arrives on their farm, having been sent across the Atlantic for fear that he would be killed by fascists. This is Bexhet Konar, sometimes called Becks, who Krivak reveals will go on to marry Hannah, fight in World War II, and die in a hunting accident a few years later. Eventually, the narrative reveals Bexhet's wartime activities, which also showcases Krivak's penchant for evocative prose: "Becks saw men in the line of the column ahead of him wither, like they had fallen asleep in mid-stride." It's one of several scenes where Krivak evokes hardship through deftly worded passages. Earlier in the novel, a scene of the Depression's effect on a Pennsylvania community emerges via a description of characters drinking "pine-needle tea and coffee made from chicory." Eventually, the book's focus shifts to Becks and Hannah's sons, Bo and Sam. Sam's time in a POW camp in Vietnam and his heroin addiction haunt him, and both brothers must come to terms with their father's wartime legacy. Though combat plays a big part, this is a subtle and nuanced work.

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Starred review from April 15, 2023
Krivak's resplendent multigenerational family saga expertly braids the horrors of war with the struggles of those waiting for loved ones to return home. He again features the Vinich family, introduced in The Sojourn (2011) and The Signal Flame (2017), now completing the Dardan Trilogy. When 14-year-old Bexhet (Becks) Konar, having escaped fascist Hungary in 1933, arrives at the home of Jozef Vinich in Dardan, Pennsylvania, he is reunited with the man who saved his life when he was an orphaned infant in WWI. He also meets Jozef's daughter, Hannah, who will become his wife. Becks returns to Europe to fight for his adopted homeland in WWII, is separated from his unit, and endures a harrowing journey home. Krivak's prose is earthy, assured, and exquisitely rendered in evocative descriptions of the natural world juxtaposed with visceral combat scenes. The language is lush, alternating in cadence to reflect the action and settings. The accounts of survival in war-torn countries are particularly striking, illustrating the dichotomy of beauty and death. Krivak is equally adept at exploring the emotional sinews connecting family, community, and country. As successive generations of the Vinich and Konar family are called to war, incurring scars both physical and psychological, it is those human bonds that provide healing.

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