The Sojourn
A World War I sniper's dreams of glory collide with the terrible reality of combat.
The Sojourn By Andrew Krivak Bellevue Literary Press 191 pp.
By David Abrams for The Barnes & Noble Review
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On the day I finished reading The Sojourn, Andrew Krivak’s riveting novel about World War I, the last surviving male veteran of that “war to end all wars” died. Claude Choules was 110 when he passed away at a nursing home in Perth, Australia, and I wonder what he would have thought of Krivak’s story about a sniper who undergoes the standard hells of war literature before arriving at uneasy peace with himself on the last page. Though Choules was a seaman with the British Royal Navy, I suspect he shared the same kind of scarred psyche as Jozef Vinich, the Austrian sharpshooter in "The Sojourn" who comes marching home full of “grief and desolation.” Mr. Choules was, after all, a pacifist.
And isn’t that the resonant effect of most war literature – to turn readers’ hearts and minds against militarized conflict? There is, of course, a strand of fiction which celebrates and glorifies the act of man killing man, but the most serious and enduring works of literature provoke us to reconsider the ends in light of the means. Think of "All Quiet on the Western Front," "A Farewell to Arms," even "Catch-22," and it’s the horrors of battle scenes which stick in our memory and pour cold water on delusions of war's grandeur (though nations seem little able to remember the lesson).
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"The Sojourn" is no exception and, in terms of the power of its prose, deserves to be placed on the same shelf as Remarque, Hemingway, and Heller (though you won’t find a trace of humor in this sobering novel.) Krivak’s style is simple, direct, and sedate, but when violence appears, it comes in unforgettable detail:
"Miro was killed in a wave of shelling by the Russians, blown in half, this man who fought in their company said, but taking some time to die as his legless trunk of a body lay against the stump of a fallen tree and he clawed at the sky, pleading for someone to help him."
"The Sojourn" is told in three parts and Krivak paces his cadence to the beat of a three-act play, beginning with a prologue set in 1899 in a Colorado mining town where Jozef’s father, a Slovak immigrant, oversees the smelter. The opening section ends with a shocking scene in which Jozef’s mother is killed on a train trestle, as she tosses the infant into the river below to save him. As the main part of the book starts, we find Jozef and his father have eventually moved back to the “ol’ kawntree,” to a small village “in the northeast corner of the Hungarian Empire.” The elder Vinich retreats to the pastoral life of a shepherd. He raises his son to be a hunter who can become invisible against the earth – a trait that will later serve him well as a sniper.
As a restless youth tending sheep on the hillside, Jozef filled himself with “the imagined valor of heroic battles, and the thought that death would be a thing I doled out to others who dared resist.” He’s determined to leave home as soon as he can so he can forge a better path in life than his father, the failed miner-cum-shepherd. “I wanted to become what he was not.” As he sets out on that path early in the book, Krivak makes a point of telling us how Jozef’s head swims with the glory of war:
"When we went back down to Pastvina for the winter in 1914, all we heard was talk of the war. Boys a few years older than I wore their cadet uniforms daily, and men from our village marched off to the conscription office in Eperjes to join the fight against the Russians on the eastern front. There was a fever rising, and not just for battle. 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. Or maybe I’m just remembering what the thoughts of war began to evoke in me."
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