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If men are to suffer Fate, it is best that they suffer it bravely in war, and that their stories are retold after them. Like the Appearance of Horses displays this classical vision of American soldiers and leavens it with grief given and, meekly, received. This 2023 novel by Andrew Krivak ends his “Dardan trilogy,” which depicts the wandering Slovakian-American family which fought the every major war of the twentieth century.
In The Sojourn (2011), Krivak told the story of Jozef Vinich, the American-born child of Slovakian immigrants who grew up among the Carpathians of his parents’ country before surviving his campaign as a Hungarian sniper during WWI. The Signal Flame (2017) follows the thread of Jozef’s return to the United States and his transformation into a landed patriarch outside the fictional Pennsylvanian town of Dardan, specifically narrating how his grandson, Bo Konar, must take up the land after Jozef’s death in 1972. During The Signal Flame, Bo mourns two men: his brother, Sam, a Marine presumed dead in Vietnam; and his father, Bexhet “Becks” Konar, who died when Bo was only a child. These men become the protagonists of Like the Appearance of Horses, which returns to the decades before The Signal Flame to retell Becks’s service in WWII but also flows forward from Sam’s traumatized return to Dardan in 1973. Because Krivak has woven the three novels tightly within one another, reviewing one necessarily requires discussion of the other two.
The trilogy’s splendor of style and narrative grows from the classical Greek influence which Krivak embroiders across the novels. Infants are delivered to strangers who become their relatives; men from strange lands arrive to perform heroic deeds of protection; and their fates are retold to their descendants. Like the Appearance of Horses grounds these mythical images in the Slovakian history of the Viniches and Konars, all in Krivak’s prose of sparing surfaces and grand depths.
At the end of The Sojourn, Jozef had saved Becks as a newborn and entrusted him to Hungarian Romani. At the beginning of Horses, the teenaged Becks finds Jozef in Dardan, after his adopted grandfather had sent him “beyond the water in search of the vine.” Becks marries Hannah, Jozef’s only daughter, before he serves in the American forces on the German fronts of WWII but falls in with the Romani anti-fascist resistance in borderless eastern Europe. The start of his lost years there captivate the “From a Long Way Off” chapter of the novel, which details Becks’s own wandering but also his part within the larger, war-torn continent. Here, Fate is upon him: “each [man] played out the role given to him in the place where he was found. The place where fate had found him long ago.” Becks, approaching his death after returning the war’s end, wanders and fights wholly without complaint. “It was the road he walked,” the narration states. “The long road, the Roma called it, nothing else.”
But the reader only understands his road in “The Sojourner and the Fatherless,” where Frances Posol (an enigmatic cousin of Jozef’s late wife) retells Becks’s exploits to Sam and Bo while they visit her one afternoon, reenacting Fate’s guidance over Becks through her narration. Her pages-long monologue also includes Frances’s own covert travels into communist Czechoslovakia to support persecuted Catholic priests there, her own brave fate which she tells simply as a self-professed “widow who was no widow, and yet still presses the judge.”
Becks, Frances says, had been the subject of “whispers about those who stood up to the Nazis along the border, defied the sympathizers among the Slovaks, and in the end killed members of the Hlinka Guard and its POHG in ways too brutal to tell in retribution for the brutality of that own group’s brutality.” She does then tell his ways of retribution, though they’re brutal, as grim deeds of righteousness. His justice began with six fascists who’d killed a Romani caravan that included Becks’s adoptive grandfather. All six were found with “their throats slit, their eyes wide, and their bodies stacked in three stacks of two, each one on top of the other in the shape of a cross.” Frances corrects Bo and Sam’s misunderstandings of their father—Bo had only known him as an unspeaking shell of a man who’d been arrested for desertion in WWII, while Sam had never known him at all. Her narration casts Becks as both mythic and Mosaic, as a man who could’ve been “a demon unleashed by the Gypsies and bent on death” but who only acted after “God opened his eyes in this world to the sorrow brought upon his people,” for Frances knows that “story is how [those who remembered] shaped and lived and made sense of their lives.” Horses shapes Becks anew for his sons and for the reader who has already glimpsed him in The Signal Flame. His suffering courage during the war makes sense of his Fate—the same courage Krivak also gives to Sam, though only Sam is fated to live.
And live Sam does, with no small suffering. After remaining an unanswered prayer throughout The Signal Flame, he returns to Dardan in Horses, meeting with his brother and his former fiancée, Ruth, in the “A Settled Place” chapter. Though Krivak’s sweep between settings and subjects enriches the novel, he doesn’t write all its sections with the same richness, and “A Settled Place” is the novel’s weakest portion: the third-person narration through Ruth over-emotes in reductive prose which lacks the plainspoken significance present everywhere else. Through Ruth’s perception, Sam’s homecoming is cloyingly sentimental rather than genuinely uncomfortable. But by “And Wished for the Day,” when Sam in the first person retells his capture in Vietnam and captivity in Hoa Lo to his future son, Horses returns to its usual grim resonance of bearing witness.
“I believed it was there I would die, in that place where the war I fought was with myself,” Sam says. “Believed it with a kind of faith.” There in Hoa Lo, Sam enters into the trials of the fate he won’t recognize until long afterwards: beatings, interrogations, and forced heroin addiction at the hand of a tenderly brutal prison guard, so that he becomes hollowed out and alien to his family in Dardan once he’s released. Shortly after his return, Sam abandons his mother, Bo, and Ruth to ride buses through the surreal American southwest, measuring his hours by the heroin fixes he always anticipates.
Exhausted, he rests with a woman named Kira, who returns him to his path in a decrepit desert church in Chimayo. There, after Kira draws blood from Sam’s palm for the earth of a tiny pit, his ghosts visit him to speak. “They were spirits, true,” Sam narrates, “but ones that glowed as though more alive than any living thing I had ever seen and ever will. Out of that little round pit they rose, all people I’ve known.” Becks himself appears to Sam, like the spirit of Achilles to the wandering Odysseus, and tells him to face himself “from a western shore.”
Obeying this vision, Sam travels to the Californian coast and so begins his new path without knowing its way or destination. It reunites him with Burne Grayson, his former commanding officer in Vietnam, upon an idyllic hilltop in West Virginia. As Sam tells him of his trials, Grayson sees that Sam has retained his mákarios, “the blessed” or “the fortunate” nature by which he survived Vietnam. Sam’s return to life includes his agonizing rehab from addiction, his love for (and eventual marriage to) Grayson’s sister, Lucy, and his study of classical histories at the University of West Virginia. “He read the Iliad, the Histories of Herodotus, The Peloponnesian War of Thucydides,” Krivak writes, lighting the lamps which lead Sam to become a professor of classical history by the novel’s end. Such a cozy ending conceals that Sam, like Jozef and Becks before him, remains a warrior who sojourned and was never meant to fully return to the home he’d left.
Only Bo receives the counterpart to this martial fate, the rooted virtue of cautious “self-mastery” which Krivak first gave him in The Signal Flame: “How we act. What we do,” Bo says. “The difference between the honorable man and the belligerent fool.” Bo, who stayed home to care for his mother, for Ruth, and for their land, mastered himself without going to war as his brother, father, and grandfather did. But the fate he receives—suffering grief, leading a family—equals theirs.
Like the Appearance of Horses foregrounds the grief of these men, from which Krivak whittles a moving menagerie of lives lost and remaining. Death fills the novel like “the smell of smoke and cedar” which Hannah recalls on the last day of her life. She dies on Christmas Day 2004, “no one to call out to her through the darkness”; Becks dies in a hunting accident he foreknew “even from a long way off” after returning home from WWII; Grayson kills himself in despair at returning home alive from Vietnam; and Burne, Sam’s oldest son, is killed while fighting in Iraq. Understated but desolate in describing each of these beloved dead, Like the Appearance of Horses practices the words of Epictetus which Sam and Grayson repeated to one another in Vietnam: “You must resign yourself to remaining in this post in which the gods have stationed you, until you’re called home.” Grayson writes this line as his suicide note for Sam to find, and, like him, the other characters bear their own fates to the end with very little questioning.
Horses is not a novel of wrestling with absolute Providence, as Jacob wrestled with God and was then renamed. It does draw deeply from the Christian well of the characters’ Slovak-Catholic heritage, beginning in the title, a quote from Joel 2:4: “their appearance is like the appearance of horses, and like war horses, so they run.” Not a novelist to directly critique American wars, Krivak obliquely compares the nation’s late-20th-century wars to racing locust clouds, though by his biblical allusion he confers nobility on the soldiers of honor among the Viniches and Konars. Sam, while captured in Vietnam, is labeled by one of his captors as “the horse among the locusts.” But the warlike image of Joel 2:4 still serves the novel’s larger classical imagination. Like warhorses, Sam, Becks, and Jozef run before the chariots where God tethered them, and like warhorses they do not flinch or turn from their way.
Krivak writes these men like warhorses that they might bear a garland of glory, however understatedly his prose might render them. And they are an image that becomes more glorious throughout the novel. Their loved ones and descendants venerate their lives by retelling them, as the virtue of what they’d been fated to do grows with each repeated narrative. But theirs is also a mournful glory which stands tranquil like the novel’s final moment, when Hannah Konar prepares at last to die, when “[t]he snow has stopped falling, and the night sky is clear.” Like the Appearance of Horses deserves be read widely but also closely. Its skilled, ageless narrative of fate bears a classical—even a crucified—glory.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I had originally prepared this review for publication elsewhere, but that fell through, which is sometimes how it happens. All the same, I’m glad to know that y’all are interested in reading what doesn’t appear elsewhere. As to the reams of summary—this proved to be more an essay than a review, by the end.
Speaking of reading: read The Dardan Trilogy. Begin with The Sojourn, continue through The Signal-Flame, and then finish with Like the Appearance of Horses (even if this last novel might be the weakest of the trilogy, it is still a very good book). Go slow, or sprint through, but make sure you finish. Often I can sour on minimalistic fiction that seems derived from late, curt Cormac McCarthy; reading Krivak’s novels have sweetened that style and its strengths for the time being.
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Literary Christianity, with humble rigor.
These novels are going on the list for sure. Extremely well-wrought essay/review! Thanks Kevin.