7/6/2023 0 Comments The sojourn krivak![]() ![]() Krivak’s descriptive powers are evident from the outset, though the novel’s early episodes seemed to me somewhat desultory, moving from depictions of brutal villagers to pastoral moments in a mountain shepherd’s life to a quasi-mythical anecdote about a mountain lion. Soon Jozef and his father return to Europe, where Jozef grows up in a remote corner of the northwestern Carpathians, an unforgiving place of poverty, ignorance and dour peasants, where the urge to kill someone with a pitchfork is, in the local context, quite understandable. ![]() is a short-term, disastrous experiment, as his mother dies in a freakish accident, and his father, Ondrej, has troubles of his own. Although his parents had emigrated to America and Jozef was born in Colorado, their life to the U.S. The Sojourn tells the story of Jozef Vinich, a sharpshooter in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War. Although the harsh imperatives of history require much sifting of facts, places and victims-synthesis and hindsight are essential, as part of our troubled species’ perverse CV-the novel, with its relentless subjectivity and its bloody-minded insistence on the plight of individuals, brings its own kind of necessary testimony. ![]() In The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press, 191 pages), Andrew Krivak successfully defends the parish of the novel. There will, unfortunately, always be a need for books about war, and this need takes many forms. ![]()
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