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Dlouhý Návrat (2011)

by Andrew Krivak(Favorite Author)

3.74 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Odeon

review 1: I picked up this first novel from Krivak because I had already fallen in love with his spiritual memoir, A Long Retreat. The Sojourn did not disappoint.A novel of stark and exacting beauty - not a book for everyone, since not all readers enjoy narratives this emotionally and intellectually demanding. I've only read a handful of war novels (and only Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front also dealt with WWI), but to me the details felt authentic. While the descriptions of warfare are bleak, they are less graphic than Remarque's, and all the more poignant for their spareness.The Sojourn's astonishing compression of plot is in part the product of Krivak's taut prose, more poetic than journalistic, despite the comparisons others have drawn to Hemingway's style. The similari... moreties to Hemingway derive more from the narrator's stoicism. Jozef Vinich is perhaps so stoic as to seem underdeveloped; certainly his consciousness as a boy in the Carpathian Mountains comes across as too adult, too self-aware and philosophical - a bit too much like Krivak, in fact. The same could be said for his erudite vocabulary, which felt natural as I read but on reflection didn't seem consistent with Jozef's life experience and education. Of course, we don't know what he does with himself in the New World after the war. The ease with which Jozef banishes the ghosts that haunt him does not feel true to me, but I haven't encountered any other reviewers who reacted similarly.The other principal characters are all intriguing yet enigmatic, the moments of Jozef's connections with them profound but fleeting. It is more a story of solitudes impinging upon one another than a story of community or collective experience. A simultaneously elegiac and unsentimental portrait of war.
review 2: I'm not usually a huge fan of war stories, tales of battles, but this little book is so well-conceived and well-executed that the subject matter didn't deter me. Genuine story-telling skill is at work here. The main character is a good -- at times a little unbelievably good -- young man doing his best to learn skill and integrity in a difficult life and then a difficult war. The identity of his nation is in flux, and in comparison, he finds a stable selfhood after many challenges. less

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