The Bridge on the Drina (Phoenix Fiction)
by Ivo Andric
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ivo AndricTranslator: Lovett F. Edwards
Introduction: William McNeill
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1977-08-15
ISBN: 0226020452
Number of pages: 318
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780226020457
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Book Reviews of The Bridge on the Drina (Phoenix Fiction)
Book Review: THREE NOVELS NOT TO READ / THE SADISTIC
Summary: 1 Stars
Three Novels Not To Read: The Sadistic, the Obese and the Blood-Thirsty.
I believe I have read as many books as anyone. I am not a glutton in reading, though, as there are books I will not read, and regret reading a few that I did. I will advise you of three novels not to read, as they are bad for your mind and emotions. People often know the bad effects of food they eat, but are less knowledgeable about the possible bad effects of what they put into their minds. Of course, I would not stop anyone from reading (as I would not stop an adult from eating, but I tend to avoid people who are obese who do not have a medical reason for it, and people of poor reading habits), but knowing what is undesirable will help counter the bad effects, ---as perhaps exercise helps counter the bad effects of fried foods, fat, salt, sugar, processed food and bad carbohydrates.
1- The Sadistic: The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andric.
Andric's book had been on my list to read since adolescence. I was not enthusiastic to read him because I had been informed of the sadism displayed in his book, the first of his historical trilogy of Bosnia,--- oh, dear!
One time at a library book sale I discovered a copy, and bought it for a dollar. I was reluctant to begin reading it, but then I thought I owed it to my education to do so. I lasted not much further than one hundred pages, maybe to 120 or so. At that point, Andric was describing in excruciating detail the impalement of an opponent of the regime by the brutal rulers of it and in loving detail, as I perceived. I put down the book, and thought about it for a few days, and then tossed it into the garbage. I did not and do not want to know what being impaled means in its entirety. (It is not a simple pounding of a stake through the heart, but is crueler than that. It is more torturous than crucifixion. Christ would have welcomed crucifixion rather than impalement. )
A number of years later, I found another copy of Andric's book at a yard sale, and this time for a quarter. I bought it, brought it home, thought about it overnight, and then tossed it into the trash. I am perfectly educated without having read that book.
Ivo Andric won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1975. Good luck to all who read him.
*(I have thought for a number of years that the Nobel Committee is an organization that is very much overdue for a thorough investigation and savage cleaning, especially for its decisions in literature and politics. It now gives the peace prize for presumption of good works, as in the recent award (2009), and maybe soon for presumption for a literary work yet to be written. All of Western society was affected by brutal violence, once the Indian killing and the Civil War in America cleared the way for it, and the prize for Andric is the result. The Nobel Committee needs a cleansing like Hercules at the Augean stables.)
2- The Obese - Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon.
I had purchased Pynchon's first book, V, back in the 1960s, and found it worth reading. I also read The Crying of Lot 49, and accepted it as par for the course for novels that were published at the time. I will admit that I have not retained a great deal from these fashionable novels, though I meant to keep up with Pynchon's work.
About fifteen years ago, I picked up Gravity's Rainbow. I dutifully began reading it, and thought I was getting into it, ---though I could not see where it was going, but then I reacted. It is a huge book, well over 700 pages in small print. I had far too many things to do and other books to read than to continue with this fat slob of a book. It must contain more words than all the rest of the works in the western tradition from Homer, both Testaments, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman and all the books in the American literary tradition. I could not and cannot bear the ponderings of the fatso literary mind as displayed in the book. (It appeared to me that Pynchon had got hold of a word processor, a novelty at the time he started to write his book, I assume, and could not let go.)
There are at least two ways to hit a target. One way is to load a double-barreled shotgun with buckshot, stand about five feet from the bull's-eye, and blast away. Of course the bull's-eye will be hit, and even blown to bits along with the rest of the target and the fence on which it was fastened. Another way is to use a high-powered rifle, stand three miles away, aim carefully, and---Zoooooook!---send a single bullet directly into the center of the bull's-eye. I would prefer the second way, in target shooting and in literary composition, as it is more skillful and satisfying in style. It indicates a disciplined mind.
Gustave Flaubert, the great 19th century French novelist and the writer who established the modern idiom of the novel, was an advocate of finding the exact word (le mot juste) to describe his compositions, and thus preferred the high-powered rifle style. Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, took the shotgun approach and used every word he ever learned and many thousands of times. He can thus, in his novel, be described as the ultimate anti-Flaubertian (Flaubertesque?) writer. Of course, modern fiction is given much latitude in narrative form, but I do not care to lard my mind with such lard as did Pynchon. But again, if everything possible is said then I guess a writer gets to say what he wants to say, or mean, eventually, whatever it is. If you say everything then eventually you will say something significant, ---I suppose. If you could disentangle what he might have meant from what he wrote, you might have something. But that is the le mot juste style. Have fun when you read the book.
Pynchon has written other novels since Gravity's Rainbow, but I lost interest in him, as I have for most modern fiction because I find it narrow-minded, specious and contingent.
3- The Bloodthirsty - Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy.
First of all, this book cannot be called a novel because it does not have character development. The main characters, though I am being kind in calling them so, the Judge and "the Kid" remain throughout the novel exactly the same, evil incarnate and stupidity incarnate. Modern fiction is given much latitude in format, but this book needs another genre. I suggest it be classified as Horror Fiction for Intellectuals, because in McCarthy's book the hero (or whatever) dies; in Horror Fiction for adolescents, the hero lives and triumphs. This is the only literary difference between the two genres. (It is a male companion piece to the romance novel genre, but in a studly way. Whereas the romance novel has "romantic rape" at its core, Blood Meridian has actual rape, torture and murder, the "shoot `em up" style of writing.)
Another first of all is that I read the book on the advice of Harold Bloom. It was the worse literary advice I ever got. (Unlike Bloom, I was unable - and thankfully - to overcome my repugnance of the book. The problem with Bloom is that he has read so much that he could take the advertising blurb on a tube of toothpaste and write a critical thesis of American intellectual history based on it.) The book is a monolithic, monomaniac working out of the critical thesis assumed by Bloom that America is an absolutely bloodthirsty place with its heroes (a la Billy Budd) reticent, even mute, sacrificial and barely even interactive with their environment. Such a hero is indistinguishable from a stupid and na?ve bystander. In fact, McCarthy's so-called ur-hero (or whatever), "the Kid" is totally non-comprehending to the point of not even understanding the context of his life. He is a mute and a neuter, stupid and unheroic and is qualitatively different than Melville's Billy Budd. He deserves to get killed in a toilet by the Judge. The book represents the dumbing-down of American literature, a cynical view of the author. It seems that the crude, primitive, adolescent development of America has found its nadir in McCarthy's work. It derives from the belief that the source or truth of things is "down- diggety-deep" in the psychic life of man, derived from Freud and company. Such belief is a metaphor and no more true or false than the view that all things good, true, beautiful and rational are from the "above" and beyond. (There is the possibility that McCarthy wrote his book in belief and to the life, alas if so.)
As Bloom taught, so McCarthy wrote, though they may have never met, and maybe all the worse for it. While it is true that a new novel takes some of its power from novels written previously, it still has to stand on its own, --- and Blood Meridian does not. All the books in Bloom's head have filled the gaps of McCarthy's novel. You have heard that America is one long bloody fight. McCarthy's book is a working out of that thesis in mangled, dying flesh. No one needs to tell me that, though, and so the book is redundant. The book, further, is to be comprehended by sociology, and not by literature, a deadly error. It is a derivative work of literature, and not a novel.
The worst thing about McCarthy's book, however, is that he wasted my time in reading it, as all his percepts and brutalities can be picked up elsewhere. There is nothing new in it: slaughter in the West; a superhuman (and perverted) villain; a moronic hero; hatred of the other (Native Americans). It may be the full working out of Manifest Destiny in the American West, an ideology made of bloody flesh.
Blood Meridian represents the end of the novel in America in what may be called The Literature of the Republic. (Now it is time to consider a canon for The Literature of the American Empire.)
*
I am perfectly cognizant that my advice will not put off anyone from reading the books but may whet their appetite for them. Consider that I intended it.
[I may write a separate review of Blood Meridian in a new format for review literature. It will have as its title: Blood Redundant: The Novel of the American Bloodlust. Or, perhaps I will call it Manifest Destiny: The Book of Indian-Killing.]
(TRC Final Revision 12-03-09)
Summary of The Bridge on the Drina (Phoenix Fiction)
The Bridge on the Drina is a vivid depiction of the suffering history has imposed upon the people of Bosnia from the late 16th century to the beginning of World War I. As we seek to make sense of the current nightmare in this region, this remarkable, timely book serves as a reliable guide to its people and history.
"No better introduction to the study of Balkan and Ottoman history exists, nor do I know of any work of fiction that more persuasively introduces the reader to a civilization other than our own. It is an intellectual and emotional adventure to encounter the Ottoman world through Andric's pages in its grandiose beginning and at its tottering finale. It is, in short, a marvelous work, a masterpiece, and very much sui generis. . . . Andric's sensitive portrait of social change in distant Bosnia has revelatory force."-William H. McNeill, from the introduction
"The dreadful events occurring in Sarajevo over the past several months turn my mind to a remarkable historical novel from the land we used to call Yugoslavia, Ivo Andric's The Bridge on the Drina."-John M. Mohan, Des Moines Sunday Register
Born in Bosnia, Ivo Andric (1892-1975) was a distinguished diplomat and novelist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. His books include The Damned Yard: And Other Stories, and The Days of the Consuls.
"No better introduction to the study of Balkan and Ottoman history exists, nor do I know of any work of fiction that more persuasively introduces the reader to a civilization other than our own. It is an intellectual and emotional adventure to encounter the Ottoman world through Andric's pages in its grandiose beginning and at its tottering finale. It is, in short, a marvelous work, a masterpiece, and very much sui generis. . . . Andric's sensitive portrait of social change in distant Bosnia has revelatory force."-William H. McNeill, from the introduction
"The dreadful events occurring in Sarajevo over the past several months turn my mind to a remarkable historical novel from the land we used to call Yugoslavia, Ivo Andric's The Bridge on the Drina."-John M. Mohan, Des Moines Sunday Register
Born in Bosnia, Ivo Andric (1892-1975) was a distinguished diplomat and novelist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. His books include The Damned Yard: And Other Stories, and The Days of the Consuls.
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