Praise for The Bear
NEA Big Read selection
Mountain Book Competition Winner
Massachusetts Book Awards Winner
Chautauqua Prize Finalist
Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlist
Julia Ward Howe Book Award Finalist
“The Bear is a luminous book of a standard one sees perhaps once every generation. . . . As [it] tenderly breaks your heart, piece by piece, it fills that void with something powerful and timeless. Written with precision, clarity, and gentle fluidity, The Bear reminds us that all we need to know awaits us in the wild.” —Pete Takeda, Mountain Book Competition Jury citation
“This fable about seeking harmony with nature by Earth's last human inhabitants—a father and daughter—has lessons of love, loss, family and survival.” —Massachusetts Book Awards jury citation
“Lyrical. . . . Gorgeous. . . . Krivak’s serene and contemplative novel invites us to consider a vision of time as circular, of existence as grand and eternal.” —Washington Post
“Arresting, exquisite. . . . The Bear is more than a parable for our times, it’s a call to listen to the world around us before it’s too late.” —Observer
“Beautiful. . . . So loving and vivid that you can feel the lake water and smell the sea. . . . A perfect fable for the age of solastalgia.” —Slate
“[A] tender apocalyptic fable . . . endowed with such fullness of meaning that you have to assign this short, touching book its own category: the post-apocalypse utopia.” — Wall Street Journal
“A powerful allegory about the struggles and graces of life.” —America Magazine
“A beautiful, gripping, thought-provoking exploration of human rewilding and nature’s dominion.” —Winnipeg Free Press
“With artistry and grace . . . Krivak delivers a transcendent journey into a world where all living things—humans, animals, trees—coexist in magical balance, forever telling each other’s unique stories. This beautiful and elegant novel is a gem.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A moving post-apocalyptic fable for grown-ups. . . . Ursula K. Le Guin would approve.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Engagingly different. . . . Unfolds in graceful, luminous prose.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“[Krivak’s] sentences are polished stones of wonder. . . . The elegiac tone reflects what is lost and what will be lost, an enchantment as if Wendell Berry had reimagined Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” —Booklist
“The power of a classic myth. . . . Krivak’s lyrical tribute to the natural world and the necessity for humans to coexist with it is an essential message cloaked within an allegory of haunting beauty.” —Shelf Awareness for Readers
“A lovely, unforgettable experience.” —Foreword Reviews
“In spare and lovely prose, Andrew Krivak folds the deep past and the far future into a remarkable fable about our inheritance as humanity makes a harmonic return to the spirit and animal worlds. This book follows you, like a river under ice.” —Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master’s Son and Fortune Smiles
“A tight yet expansive novel in prose so vivid you forget these are words and not the cedar, trout, and stones of a post-Anthropocene Earth. Through the middle of The Bear walks an unnamed girl whose determination to go on living will fill you with awe.” —Salvatore Scibona, author of The End and The Volunteer
“Reading The Bear will bring you back to the wonder-filled stories of childhood, the sort that linger, that alter our understanding of the world, that shape who we become. Such is the simple and profound power of Krivak’s unexpectedly hopeful novel. Crafted with as much care and mastery as the finest oaken bow, this is a book that manages to be both timeless and urgent, clear-eyed and tender-hearted, archetypal and unconventional: a bedtime tale told by a prophet. A wonder in itself.” —Josh Weil, author of The New Valley and The Age of Perpetual Light
More Praise for Andrew Krivak
“Some writers are good at drawing a literary curtain over reality, and then there are writers who raise the veil and lead us to see for the first time. Krivak belongs to the latter.” —National Book Award judges’ citation
“[Krivak’s] sentences accrue and swell and ultimately break over a reader like water: they are that supple and bracing and shining.” —Leah Hager Cohen
“Incandescent.” —Marlon James
“A writer of rare and powerful elegance.” —Mary Doria Russell
“Destined for great things.” —Richard Russo
“[A] singular talent.” —Jesmyn Ward
“An extraordinarily elegant writer, with a deep awareness of the natural world.” —New York Times Book Review
“[Krivak] bring[s] out the vast compassion, humanity and love of his rich, fully developed characters.” —Star Tribune
“Krivak’s story and characters are mythic.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Krivak has his own voice, given to lyrical observations on the nature of human existence.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ 2019-09-30
A moving post-apocalyptic fable for grown-ups.
We're not entirely sure why it is that an unnamed man and his unnamed daughter are an endangered species, but we do know, after the man dies, that the animals call her "the last one." Before his demise, the man teaches his daughter how to hunt, make snowshoes and arrows, comprehend the ways of the trees and the seasons in their mountain stronghold; they read "poetry from poets with strange names like Homer and Virgil, Hilda Doolittle and Wendell Berry, poems about gods and men and the wars between them, the beauty of small things, and peace," and they talk night and day about the things that matter. Krivak (The Signal Flame, 2017, etc.) delivers no small amount of poetry himself in what might have been a cloying exercise in anthropomorphism, for once the preteen daughter is alone, a noble-minded bear takes care of her, avoiding "the place of the walls" where humans once dwelled in favor of alpine lakes and, in winter, a remote cave. A puma joins in the adventure to provide food while the bear sleeps, assuring her that she will become part of a story "for the forest to remember for as long as there is forest beneath the sun." Part of the girl's task is to bury her father on the distant mountaintop next to her mother's grave, then, as the years pass, to honor them, "a girl no longer, though forever their child." A literary rejoinder of sorts to Alan Weisman's The World Without Us (2007), Krivak's slender story assures us that even without humans, the world will endure: The bears and mountain lions will come into their own in a world of buckled roofs and "ruined books," and they themselves will tell stories under the light of the Great Bear. That's small comfort to some humans, no doubt, but it makes for a splendid thought exercise and a lovely fable-cum-novel.
Ursula K. Le Guin would approve. An effective, memorable tale.
