The Signal Flame by Andrew Krivák

Published by Scribner on January 24, 2017

The Signal Flame begins in 1972 with the death of Bohumír Konar’s grandfather, an event that comes a few months after Bo’s brother Sam was reported missing in action in Vietnam. Sam has left behind a pregnant fiancé, Ruth Younger, whose father killed Sam’s father in a hunting accident. Sam and Bo are living with a legacy of shame, their father having been labeled a deserter in World War II.

The story backtracks to 1941, the year of Bo’s birth, when his father, Bexhet Konar, goes off to war, and quickly jumps to 1948, when Bo and his father are reunited, and jumps forward again to his father’s death. The story then follows Bo during his young life in Pennsylvania and Maryland as he makes choices about his life, choices that are shaped by love and tragedy. Eventually the narrative returns to 1972.

The harshness of life and the difficulty of forgiveness are dominant themes in The Signal Flame. The classic literary conflicts — man against man, against nature, and against himself — all contribute to the novel’s dramatic moments.

When it returns to 1972, the drama concerns Sam’s mother, who won’t forgive Ruth’s father and won’t accept Sam’s baby into her life, Bo’s entreaties to forgive notwithstanding. Ruth and Sam’s mother and brother are all coping with Sam’s MIA status, each trying to find a way to process their new lives.

Andrew Krivák evokes a strong sense of time and place to tell a small, intensely personal story of two neighboring families making their lives on a wooded mountain. Parts of The Signal Flame are remarkably sad — not in ways the reader might expect — and it is a tribute to Krivák’s prose style and sense of pace that the reader can take time with those moments without having them overwhelm the story as a whole.

The Signal Flame is a story about sadness, but it is also a story about how people endure sadness and find new ways to give their lives meaning. Different readers will find different lessons in this book. In addition to forgiveness, the story’s themes include loss as a force of bonding, the absence of closure as a source of both hope and pain, the difficulty of determining when to leave the past in the past and move into the future, the power of family memories, and the role that nature and animals play in a fulfilling life. The quiet intensity of this novel is sometimes unsettling, and those unsettling moments reflect the difficult emotional experiences that are common to every life.

RECOMMENDED