Publishers Weekly
03/27/2023
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. (May)
From the Publisher
Praise for Like the Appearance of Horses
Massachusetts Book Awards Longlist
American Booksellers Association Indie Next List for Reading Groups
Reading Group Choices “Top Picks” selection
Library Journal “Best Literary Fiction of the Year” selection
Washington Independent Review of Books “Favorite Books of the Year” selection
Saturday Evening Post “Hot Weather” selection
“Raises provocative questions about how we perceive and engage with the past and is a further testament to Krivak’s masterful abilities as a storyteller.” —WBUR
“Forceful and absorbing.” —WOSU
“Lyrical, moving. . . . While Krivak depicts the violence of war with frightening intimacy, he’s also attuned to the persistence of beauty and grace in nature and in what love endures.” —Fordham Magazine
“A startling clarity characterizes [Krivak’s] language, which can only be called luminous.” —Washington Independent Review of Books
“[Krivak’s] prose is spare and exquisite, breathing life into the mountains, the forests, and the foxholes these characters inhabit. A beautifully emotional and delicate novel.” —Historical Novels Review
“Krivak’s resplendent multigenerational family saga expertly braids the horrors of war with the struggles of those waiting for loved ones to return home.” —Booklist (starred review)
“[An] intensely readable whopper of a book.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“Subtle and nuanced.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Krivak impresses with this layered story of deferred homecomings and the elusive nature of peace.” —Publishers Weekly
“Compelling and deftly crafted.” —Midwest Book Review
“Andrew Krivak charts a razor-fine line between war and peace, damnation and redemption, estrangement and love, and along the way gives us a gorgeously detailed portrait of an American family. Whether he’s writing about battle, the natural world, or the most private, searing matters of the heart, Krivak brings a rare mastery to the page, a synthesis of language and deep perception that delivers revelation after revelation. Like the Appearance of Horses is a major achievement.” —Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Devil Makes Three
“Krivak’s Homeric novel is at once intimate and sweeping, expanding an epic story set into motion in The Sojourn. Tenderly attentive to all that is given and taken by war, Like the Appearance of Horses is a graceful, heroic accomplishment that speaks to the costs of duty when violence is as constant as the Pennsylvania mountains that anchor and separate this indelible family we’ve come to know so personally.” —Asako Serizawa, author of Inheritors
Select Praise for Andrew Krivak
“Some writers are good at drawing a literary curtain over reality, and then there are writers who raise the veil and lead us to see for the first time. Krivak belongs to the latter.” —National Book Award judges’ citation
“[Krivak’s] work has been compared to William Faulkner’s in its rich sense of place, to Wendell Berry’s in its attentiveness to natural beauty, and to Cormac McCarthy’s in its deep investigation of violence and myth. Yet all of Krivak’s writing, and especially his fiction, presents a truly singular vision.” —Anthony Domestico, Image
“An extraordinarily elegant writer, with a deep awareness of the natural world.” —Roxana Robinson, New York Times Book Review
“Eloquent, sensitive.” —Jennifer Haigh, Boston Globe
“Incandescent.” —Marlon James
“Spare and lovely.” —Adam Johnson
“Grand and unforgettable.” —Maaza Mengiste
“A writer of rare and powerful elegance.” —Mary Doria Russell
“Destined for great things.” —Richard Russo
“[A] singular talent.” —Jesmyn Ward
“Explores themes that profoundly resonate today.” —Harper’s Bazaar
Library Journal
★ 04/13/2023
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
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-03-14
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.
