[A] painful, beautiful new book ... Krivak’s descriptions of this forested world, so loving and vivid that you can feel the lake water and smell the sea, make the answer clear: It’s because there’s joy to be found in carrying on ... If there’s anything to quibble with in this beautiful book, it’s the utopianism of this vision of the circularity of man’s relationship to the land ... Written less subtly, this could feel like another fantasy about white return to the land. But this is also a story of ultimate loss, leaving us with no uncertainty about the future of humanity ... a perfect fable for the age of solastalgia.
The Bear is a dreamy dispatch from the end of the world. In Andrew Krivak’s palimpsest novel, the reassertion of nature over the bones of human civilization is a dignified and regretless process ... The novel concentrates less on the tragedies of humanity’s disappearance than it does on the interconnectedness of all beings. Within this story: if the last human goes out nobly, having treated the world around them with respect, all has not been lost. The girl and her father are worthy guides through their latter day landscape, as are the creatures that address the girl through an otherworldly haze. Triumphant to its last breath, The Bear is a lovely, unforgettable experience.
Krivak’s gorgeous descriptions suggest a world that has returned to its proper equilibrium and rightful inhabitants ... shares with its predecessors a preoccupation with loss and endurance, themes explored here in a more mythic style still firmly grounded in physical reality. Any shadow of preciousness is quickly dispelled by the clarity of Krivak’s prose and the precision with which he delineates the girl’s struggles during a bitter winter when she is once again alone ... Krivak reminds us of the extraordinary knowledge and discipline those skills require in detailed, virtually step-by-step accounts of tasks from making snowshoes to skinning a deer and harvesting its carcass for food. Depicting the drama of her daily efforts to survive, The Bear demonstrates its kinship with such classic coming-of-age-in-the-wild tales as My Side of the Mountain and Island of the Blue Dolphins ... Krivak’s serene and contemplative novel invites us to consider a vision of time as circular, of existence as grand and eternal beyond the grasp of individuals — and of a world able to outlive human destructiveness.
... strange and strangely tender ... Mr. Krivak balances this sort of mysticism with closely observed descriptions of sewing leather for shoes, carving wood for bows and arrows or spotting eddies to fish for trout. These activities are endowed with such fullness of meaning that you have to assign this short, touching book its own category: the post-apocalypse utopia.
Written in spare, beautiful prose that evokes the richness of the mountains, ocean, river, and forest through which the girl travels, The Bear is a fable that centers the earth and its inherent generosity toward those who treat it with respect. Life in the wilderness is brutal, the death of creatures essential so the girl can live, but the girl brings reverence to each kill, sometimes even leaving pieces of meat for other creatures to find. In a world drowning in careless excess, The Bear suggests another way, and the rewards are great.
In this arresting, exquisite novel, time acquires a new quality. When human civilization is over and there’s no hope left for society, what Krivak imagines is a stillness ... Other authors (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Ling Ma’s Severance to name a few) focus on the catastrophe followed by its fallout. This is what makes The Bear so striking. Krivak isn’t interested in how or why human society is ending ... This respect for nature informs his choice to open The Bear at the point of human extinction. In doing so, he makes space for a meditation on stewardship ... Struck by the book’s peaceful pacing and meditation on nature, I read with a humble sense of awe rather than an ever-growing sense of dread ... Concentrating on nature as the guidepost for the book, Krivak reveals how much we’re losing when we fail to serve as good stewards of the planet. However, his tone is never didactic or melodramatic ... 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.
Most postapocalyptic novels bury us in blood or debris, but Krivak offers a completely different understanding of humans at the end of the line ... engagingly different ... As the narrative unfolds in graceful, luminous prose, the father teaches his young charge how to survive and tells her fantastical—or maybe not so fantastical—tales about bears. Throughout, the sense of wonder at nature's beauty is palpable ... Poignant but not tragic, this end-of-civilization story shows that there's no loneliness in this world when we are one with nature.
Krivak’s...spare, lyrical latest is a meditative fable set in a near-future, post-civilization world ... The sentences are polished stones of wonder and the setting deliberately vague, likely several generations since humans were earth’s dominant species. Nature has reclaimed its dominance. 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.
With artistry and grace, National Book Award–finalist Krivak...offers a story of endurance and a return to life with nature in a postapocalyptic world ... 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.
A moving post-apocalyptic fable for grown-ups ... Krivak...delivers no small amount of poetry himself in what might have been a cloying exercise in anthropomorphism ... A literary rejoinder of sorts to Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us Krivak’s slender story assures us that even without humans, the world will endure ... 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.
