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| Like the Appearance of Horses
ISBN: 9781954276147
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / Bellevue Literary Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Fiction; Literature;
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)
Andrew Krivak is an award-winning writer whose books include The Bear , a Banff Mountain Book Competition winner, Massachusetts Book Awards winner, and National Endowment for the Arts Big Read selection, as well as the freestanding novels of the Dardan Trilogy: The Sojourn , a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Chautauqua Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize; The Signal Flame , a Chautauqua Prize finalist; and Like the Appearance of Horses , a Library Journal "Best Book of the Year" and Indie Next List for Reading Groups selection. He lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire. |
