Names of Rivers Book

By the author of the critically acclaimed Water in Darkness, The Names of Rivers is a tightly crafted search for redemption and forgiveness within the shadows of a family's military past. Set in a 1980s rustbelt town south of Chicago, the novel tells the story Bruno Konick, an aged veteran of "the good war" who has spent a lifetime haunted by his own actions during the liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp; and his grandson Luke, a teenage boy forever dreaming of heroism in a post-Vietnam America. Together, they watch Luke's father Bruce, an unemployed factory worker badly disfigured during the siege of Khe Sanh, wander towards his suicidal end in a cornfield ruined by a freakish ice storm. When the youngest son Len unexpectedly returns home, recovered from the heroin addiction he learned as a hospital corpsman in Saigon, he brings with him an old wound that Bruno Konick can never let himself touch.

From a variety of perspectives, Buckman examines the complex relationships between fathers and sons, between men and history, weaving a cohesive novel rich in life's substance. Where his prose echoes Hemingway's extraordinary actuality, a constant reminder of the flesh's terrible importance in human relations, his vision heeds Faulkner's call for basic humanity amidst the pitiless and endless violence of twentieth-century history. A story of love and pain, of sin and forgiveness, The Names of Rivers enacts a drama rich in biblical tradition and sheer moral weight by asking the oldest of all questions: am I my brother's keeper?



About the Author

Daniel Buckman was born in 1967 and served as a paratrooper with the US's Army's 82d Airborned Division. He lives and works in Chicago.

Publishers Weekly

Horrifying secrets hold a dysfunctional family together in Buckman's intensely written second novel, set in the small Midwest town where Bruno Konick, a guilt-ridden World War II veteran, is struggling to make sense of the choices that have essentially destroyed his two sons and now threaten to ruin his grandson. Bruno's son Bruce, battling the external fury of combat and the internal storm of his lust for another soldier, exploded a grenade in his foxhole in Vietnam, maiming himself. Now a hopeless drunk, he roams the town, buying beer with money stolen from his father. Bruno's other son, Len, also a Vietnam vet, shoots heroin, visits prostitutes and fights the memory of a childhood sexual assault by his brother. Len is glad that Bruce was disfigured in the war: he sees it as a sort of divine retribution, but he can neither understand why his brother can never seek his forgiveness, nor why his father refuses to face what happened. Bruno chooses to ignore the pain and suffering around him, closing off his small, tortured life until he must confront Bruce's grisly death and the prospect of his grandson, Luke, joining the marines to relive the imagined glory days of his elders. Buckman (Water in Darkness) displays a remarkably exacting touch with his lead characters and supporting cast, guiding the reader through a tangle of misery and chaos with his surefooted storytelling skills. He scores with a bounty of themes touching fathers and sons, dark family secrets, revenge and redemption, tying it all up in a stunning but believable conclusion.