Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. 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.”Ī late but very effective addition to the literature of World War I, and an auspicious debut. 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. 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.

Recognized for his skills, Jozef is put to work as a sniper, grimly felling any Italians who fall into his sights. 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. 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.

An assured, meditative novel that turns on a forgotten theater in a largely forgotten war.īorn in America, Jozef Vinich has a frontiersman’s way with a rifle.

The sojourn krivak