Raduan Nassar’s intensely powerful novel
Ancient Tillage is an essential and unflinching
coming-of-age story (reviewed on this page).
Heritage of Smoke
Josip Novakovich. Dzanc, $16.95 trade paper
(240p) ISBN 978-1-941088-66-1
The characters in Novakovich’s excellent stories tend to be in extremis: people
in the midst of war, or refugees escaping
it, or veterans trying to forget it. His muscular prose and remarkable sense of place
and history (both recent and somewhat
distant) make for thrilling reading.
What’s more surprising and impressive is
the breadth of territory covered here. One
story is set in Hungary in the 1950s;
another follows a Dutchman named
Martin Neeskens who worked for the
U. N. during the Bosnian conflicts in the
1990s but now lives in New York.
Another, set on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan, involves a clutch of international roommates, including two Russian
émigrés, crammed into an apartment.
Themes overlap, but each story presents
its own unique world. In the title story,
Jovan, a refugee from Croatia now living
in Belgrade, reconnects with an old friend
named Danko. The very act of mentally
reopening that door is complex—painful
and confusing and grotesquely humorous,
but above all inescapable. “Smoke is the
flavor of our memories,” Jovan says.
Novakovich’s evocative stories leave
echoes after reading. (Jan.)
; The Signal Flame
Andrew Krivák. Scribner, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-
1-5011-2637-6
National Book Award–finalist Krivák
continues in the tradition of his debut
(The Sojourn) with this bleak but breath-
taking second novel. The book opens with
the death of the family patriarch, Jozef
Vinich, who leaves his sprawling farm in
Pennsylvania’s rural Endless Mountains to
his daughter, Hannah, and oldest
grandson, Bo. While Bo runs the
roughing mill, Hannah tends the
chickens, and the two await the return of
Bo’s brother, Sam, who is reported MIA in
Vietnam. Told in three parts stretching
from Easter to Christmas Eve 1972, the
narrative soon picks up steam with the
addition of Ruth, Sam’s pregnant fiancée,
and the daughter of the man responsible
for killing Hannah’s husband in a hunting
mishap. By the third section, more back-
story has been revealed—Ruth’s ancestors’
ties to Vinich’s land, Sam’s reasons for
enlisting, Hannah’s long-held grudge
against Ruth’s father—adding texture
and depth to the family’s already rich his-
tory. Devastating accidents befall these
characters and the heartache they endure
is palpable. But there’s love, too. This
family saga is quiet at its core, but it’s
Krivák’s gorgeous prose and deep grasp of
the relationship between longing and loss
that make the book such a stunner. (Jan.)
Ancient Tillage
Raduan Nassar, trans. from the Portuguese by
K.C.S. Sotelino. New Directions, $13.95 trade
paper (144p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2656-1
This slim, intensely powerful novel
portrays the coming-of-age of a young
man named André who grew up on his
family’s farm in Brazil but has now fled to
an unnamed city in an act of rebellion
against his domineering, extremely religious, and constantly sermonizing father.
André is also running from feelings for his
sister, Ana, illicit desires that he expresses
with agonized passion in an almost phan-
tasmagoric scene alone with Ana in the
family’s chapel. Numbing his agony with
the help of generous amounts of wine,
André languishes in a boarding house
until his brother, Pedro, comes to bring
him home. In prose tonally reminiscent of
scripture, the novel explores the interior
life of a character on the brink of an emo-
tional and sexual awakening set against
the tragic portrayal of a family on the
verge of disintegration. Newly translated
from a text originally published in 1975,
this is an essential and unflinching work
that combines torment and desire to
arrive at an explosive examination of
ancestry and the world we inherit. The
novel’s conclusion, taking place at a
homecoming party for André, is breath-
taking in its almost mythological expan-
siveness. (Jan.)
World, Chase Me Down
Andrew Hilleman. Penguin, $16 trade paper
(352p) ISBN 978-0-14-311147-4
In this lively first novel, Hilleman re-imagines the life of a turn-of-the-20th-
century kidnapper who committed the
first “crime of the century.” On Dec. 18,
1900, Pat Crowe and his accomplice,
Billy Cavanaugh, abduct the 16-year-old
son of Edward Cudahy, owner of a meat-packing plant in Omaha, Neb. During
the abduction, Cudahy recognizes Pat,
forcing the kidnapper to go on the lam—
to Japan, then South Africa, where he
fights with the Boer army. Arrested after
more misadventures back in the U.S., Pat
is put on trial, finding himself a political
pawn of the haves and a folk hero to the
have-nots. In flashbacks we see Pat’s marriage to a woman named Hattie and what
transpired with Cudahy to inspire the
kidnapping. A framing device places Pat
in the 1930s, where, among other things,
he tries to make himself useful to detectives in Hopewell, N. J., investigating the
Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Although
the story is based on a variety of firsthand
accounts, the author refuses to be bound
by facts alone, and the result is a raucous
example of narrative invention. Pat makes
for an enthusiastic narrator, and he ends
his story on a surprising note that affirms
man’s infinite capacity for resilience in the
face of life’s harsh vicissitudes. (Jan.)
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