The Sojourn

Starred review from February 7, 2011
Krivak follows his revelatory memoir (A Long Retreat) with this lush, accomplished novel. After Jozef Vinich's mother dies while saving his life as an infant, Jozef and his widowed father relocate from a small Colorado mining town back to their Austrian homeland. Though Jozef's boyhood is marred by lingering feelings of abandonment, resentment, ingrained sadness, and two bullying stepbrothers, his life is enhanced by frequent dreams of his mother and a close friendship with troubled distant cousin Zlee. Both boys revel in the family hunting trips, which hone their sharpshooting abilities, expertise put to use when both go off to fight in WWI as marksmen, over Jozef's father's objections. Krivak dexterously exposes the stark, brutal realities of trench warfare, the horror of a POW camp, and the months of violent bloodshed that stole the boys' innocence. Once home from war, the author's depiction of Jozef's arduous return to life, love, and family is charged with emotion and longing, revealing this lean, resonant debut as an undeniably powerful accomplishment.

Starred review from December 1, 2011
An assured, meditative novel that turns on a forgotten theater in a largely forgotten war. Born in America, Jozef Vinich has a frontiersman's way with a rifle. Wrenched from his home after his father's defeated return to the old country—" ‘the ol' kawntree,' though it is no country for which I long or somehow miss in my old age," as the Jozef of the distant future will say—the young man is plunked down on the far edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there to be instructed in the evils of the Russians across the way. When war breaks out, though, Jozef is caught up in the great conscription and spat out on the front lines of the Tyrol, where Austrians, Czechs, Hungarians, Serbs and Germans are busily dying, as are the Italians on the opposite line. Recognized for his skills, Jozef is put to work as a sniper, grimly felling any Italians who fall into his sights. Naturally, such demi-divine power cannot go unpunished, and Krivak, in his first novel, puts Jozef through his paces, including still more tragedy, imprisonment and an endless exodus to return to an unwanted home when peace finally comes. The ghost of Hemingway informs some of Krivak's notes from the front lines, while several other literary influences seem to be evident in his slender book, including the Italian novelist and memoirist Primo Levi, himself the veteran of a very long walk through Europe, and, for obvious reasons, the Charles Frazier of Cold Mountain. Yet Krivak has his own voice, given to lyrical observations on the nature of human existence and its many absurdities: "Young men, as always, sensed a chance to leave the boredom of their villages and see to the borders of the empire and beyond, but this time their departure was imminent, and so they lived and worked and moved in a tension between excitement and rage." A late but very effective addition to the literature of World War I, and an auspicious debut.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from May 1, 2011

When a family tragedy strikes in a Colorado mining town, young Jozef Vinich and his father return to pre-World War I Austria. Together they live in poverty, working as shepherds and hunting to support themselves. When Jozef's cousin Zlee joins them, a strong bond grows between the two young men. Despite the pastoral setting, Jozef grows increasingly discontent with his rural lifestyle. Eventually Jozef and Zlee join other Austrian men on the Italian front. They not only confront the horrors of combat but also contribute to those horrors through their skill as expert marksmen. This is Krivak's first novel; his earlier work, A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, is a memoir about his experience in a Jesuit formation program. VERDICT An unsentimental yet elegant look at a character's coming-of-age as well as his survival of the Great War's brutality. With ease, it joins the ranks of other significant works of fiction portraying World War I--Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front or Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.--Faye A. Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2011
Krivak published a volume of poetry in 1999 and a memoir in 2008. The Sojourn, his first novel, begins shortly after the narrators birth in a Colorado mining town in 1899. Straitened circumstances force the narrator and his father to return to the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From there the novel ranges over wide swaths of Europe and an improbable number of coincidences. There are greedy stepparents and monstrous stepsiblings, idylls with shepherds living off the land, stern commanders who seal soldiers fates in dank chambers, kind Italian jailers, and pregnant Gypsy teenagers. He will grow, learn, love, fight, and die, and someone, whether he knew them or not, will deliver him into his grave could be a synopsis but is meant to describe the future of a single infant. The plot belongs in a book three times longer, but the prose echoes Faulkner, and Krivak shows us the little-known Italian front of WWI in fascinating episodes seen through the optical scope of a sniper rifle.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)