“ ‘To desire rank is to desire death,’ he intoned aphoristically. ‘You must find the soldier of rank, and find in yourselves the will to remain calm, silent, and alert. Then kill as though it were your only chance to live.’ ”
If the early pages of “The Sojourn” sometimes recall Cormac McCarthy (especially “The Crossing”), the heart of the book is a harrowing portrait of men at war, as powerful as Ernst Junger’s classic “Storm of Steel” and Isaac Babel’s brutally poetic Red Cavalry stories. In one episode worthy of old thriller writers such as John Buchan and Geoffrey Household, Zlee and Josef must hunt down their opposite number, a phantom-like enemy sharpshooter who almost never misses.
More from Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
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(Bellevue Literary Press) - \"The Sojourn\" by Andrew Krivak
Although “The Sojourn” is rightly marketed as a literary novel, it should also appeal to fans of Stephen Hunter’s sniper novels and David Morrell’s early thrillers, and I really shouldn’t say any more about its plot, certainly not about the sudden deaths on the snowy mountain pass or the raped Gypsy girl or the bags of gold hidden in a cave. Yet throughout, Krivak returns, again and again, to the love between a father and his son, to the burden of tragic memories, and to the fraught nature of national or ethnic identity. As Jozef says at one point: “What was a Czecho-Slovak to me, though, a boy raised among Carpathian peasants in a Magyar culture, professing loyalty in a poor school to a Hapsburg, and speaking a language in secret they spoke in a land called America?”
Let me end with a good word for the judges of this year’s National Book Award. In nominating “The Sojourn” for the NBA shortlist, the judges obviously passed over books published with more hoopla by bigger trade houses. Yet what better use is there for a literary prize than to draw attention to fine work that might otherwise be missed? So, this time, at least, the system has worked. We should be grateful all around — to Andrew Krivak for writing such a good book, to Bellevue Literary Press for publishing and promoting it, and to the National Book Award’s fiction jury for recognizing and honoring its excellence.
Dirda reviews each Thursday in Style and conducts a book discussion for The Post at wapo.st/reading-room. His latest book, “On Conan Doyle,” has just been published.
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