The Bridge on the Drina (Phoenix Fiction) by Ivo Andric
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Book Reviews of The Bridge on the Drina (Phoenix Fiction)
Book Review: a great 20th century novel
Summary: 5 Stars
The Turks built it, but many of the "Turks" were Balkan converts descended from the Slavic people of Bosnia, Serbia, and other regions. The eleven-arched bridge stood there, over the green Drina, for centuries, as the human parade passed over it. This wonderful novel tells the story of the people who lived nearby, of those who came to dominate the town from outside, and ultimately, who, in 1914, destroyed the stone span. As a novel that covers nearly 350 years, THE BRIDGE ON THE DRINA can have no continuous cast of characters. Instead, there are sharply drawn portraits of the inhabitants of Visegrad---Muslims, Serbs, Gypsies, and Jews---and the people who came from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the days when that state occupied Bosnia (1878-1914). Just as Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan's "Barometer Rising" has an explosion as the main character, so Andric has made a bridge the main character here. We meet the Turkish builders of the bridge and the local opposition to it. Accidents happen, an awful punitive impalement is described in gruesome detail. The townsmen meet on the kapia---a wide section of the bridge in its midsection--for centuries: it provides a place to talk and drink coffee, for youth to sing. A Turkish blockhouse is built in one period, to catch rebels, who fight for the end to Turkish rule. The bridge is decorated with the heads of luckless captives. The stone inn, built as a free lodging for travellers, declines and eventually collapses. A girl refuses the love of a young man who has seen her crossing the bridge, but the parents decide on a marriage. She jumps off the bridge to her death, but remains forever in the songs of townspeople. Resistance and rebellion swirl around the bridge during the 19th century before the Austro-Hungarian takeover in 1878. Gamblers appear, and maybe the Devil as well. A soldier is seduced by a Serbian woman who plans to smuggle a guerrilla leader across--he is jailed for his troubles and kills himself. Galician Jews come to run hotels and businesses, but lead sad lives. Early 20th century students argue and fight over clashing ideals---nationalism, communism, socialism. And at last the Great War empties the town and destroys the bridge. The world that so many generations had known came to an end. A vast panorama of history, philosophy, and romance fill this novel, which led to a Nobel Prize for its author in 1961. I read it over 40 years ago, but recently took it up again, having forgotten most of it. It blew me away again.
The bridge is a real one. It suffered more damages during World War II in the vicious multi-sided fighting that wracked Yugoslavia. Then, during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, thousands of Muslims were murdered and pushed from that very bridge. The bloody history continued. On page 118, Andric writes, "moments of social upset and great inevitable change usually throw up just such men, unbalanced and incomplete, to turn things inside out or lead [men] astray. This is one of the signs of times of disorder." These words, written so long before, describe Milosevic to a tee. As I read Andric's novel again---these thoughts added an extra tragic note to it.
Yugoslavia is no more. It was an idea of a certain time. Perhaps it was a good one, perhaps not: I am in no position to judge. But no doubt a cultural flowering took place. When I read this marvelous book back in my twenties, it stimulated me to look into Yugoslav literature in general. I was not disappointed. I found the novels of Krleza, Djilas, Bulatovic, Vuco, and Oljaca, all of which enriched my life. But Andric was certainly the best. He is one of the great writers of the twentieth century. If you have never read him, you have missed something.
Book Review: Water and Stone: the Biography of a Bridge
Summary: 5 Stars
Ivo Andric's stately architectonic prose spans the five-century history of Visegrad, in Bosnia, as imperturbably as the Ottoman stone bridge that centered the economic, political, and social life of the town. The bridge, as told with thorough historicity, was built as a 'gift' to the region by Mohammed Söküllü, a janissary taken from a Serbian peasant family who rose by natural ability to become the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire in the mid 16th Century. Life in Visegrad, with its uneasy blend of Muslims, Christians and Jews, flows under the bridge as steadily as time, now a turbid torrent now a turgid trickle but like Time itself always toward the sea of forgetfulness. Incidents of passion, violence, cruelty, and comedy occur and recur on the 'kapia' - the broad center of the bridge - leaving their imprint in folk songs and lurking fears. Andric writes: ""So, on the kapia, between the skies, the river and the hills, generation after generation learnt not to mourn overmuch what the troubled waters had borne away. They entered there into the unconscious philosophy of the town; that life was an incomprehensible marvel, since it was incessantly wasted and spent, yet none the less it endured 'like the bridge on the Drina'.""
That enduring phlegmatic balance, that provincial tranquillity, would last even through the decadence of Ottoman authority and the incorporation of Bosnia into another multi-cultural empire - Austria-Hungary - but it would meet its destruction with the intrusion of modernity, nationalism, and World War 1. The bridge itself would be mined and demolished in the War. Though Ivo Andric depicts the exploitation and tyranny of the Ottomans, then the crass invasive bureaucracy of the Austrians, with caustic realism, it's plain that he pines for the old days and old ways, that his vision of history is utterly conservative and nostalgic.
What's remarkably fine about this measured history is Andric's ability to share insights into the mentalities of all parties, Muslims and Jews as respectfully as Christian, rich and poor, successes and failures, those who adapt and those who don't. Like the bridge that resounds to the footsteps of all with equanimity and carries all traffic licit or illicit impartially, Andric depicts the virtuous and the wicked with open affection for their humanity. A barely-fictionalized biography of a stone bridge, 314 pages of small print, might sound like a challenge to any reader's attention span, but Andric makes it both emotionally affecting and historically enlightening. No other book, I think, can evoke the distinct realities of Balkan history, or elucidate the psychology of the post-Yugoslav calamities as vividly as this one.
For once, I urge readers not to skip the introduction by William McNeill, which outlines Bosnian history with helpful brevity. I wonder also at the authority of this translation by Lovett Edwards. It reads gracefully enough in English, but there are loopholes in it, as noted by some earlier reviewers. The biggest loophole is the identification of the Muslims of Visegrad as "Turks". Ethnic Turks they certainly were not. Rather they were the descendants of Slavic converts to Islam, chiefly from among the heretic Bogomil Christians. Since I can't read Serbo-Croatian, I'm uncertain whether Andric intended us to accept that the converts identified themselves as Turks or whether the translator simply brushed the issue aside. It is an important distinction, made important by the violence of ethnic and religious "cleansing" in the Bosnia of the 21st Century.
Chiefly it's the author's love of the place and the people - stone and water, permanence and transience - that make "The Bridge on the Drina" a beautiful reading experience.
Book Review: A Balkan Chronicle
Summary: 5 Stars
Readers who enjoyed "One Hundred Years of Solitude" will love this book, for while it is similar in feel to that masterpiece, it is broader in scope. Readers looking for insight into the labyrinth of Balkan history will find here a useful starting point. At heart, this is a book about civilization and its changes. It pivots upon the contrast between the small parochial existence of the quiet Bosnian town where the bridge is the central and everlasting feature versus the wider world of Balkan politics where Ottoman Turkey, Orthodox Serbia, and Catholic Austria-Hungary wage a centuries-long battle for political domination. The book chronicles the bridge and the town for over three centuries. It is filled with memorable characters, soldiers, lovers, saloon-keepers, priests, and town leaders. There is the 19th-century schoolmaster who embodies the parochial village so perfectly. He is better-educated than most of the townspeople, but only slightly. This reputed wisdom gives him the arrogance to act as the town historian, a duty he fulfills by keeping a small notebook in which he fails to record historical events. Even the seminal affairs of 1878, when the region was transferred from the Ottomans to the Habsburgs, merits only a few lines in his notebook because he judges that these events are simply not terribly important. And that captures the essence of the book: events in the wider world are deemed unimportant in the village until they come, like the flood in the early pages, in a torrent of change and surprise.
Thus does the town evolve, isolated from, yet thoroughly buffeted by, the great historical affairs of the centuries. In the end Pavle the merchant finds that this myopic approach has led him to ruin. Alihodja, whose unique ability to articulate the impact of world politics on the lives of the town's provincials earns him an injured ear and a reputation as an eccentric, never quite realizes how closely his vision entwines his fate with that of the bridge itself.
The standard interpretation holds that the bridge is the symbol for the Ottoman Empire, resolute and everlasting, welcoming yet exotic, and built to standards far higher than any to which this little town can aspire. In the original title Andric uses the word for a Turkish bridge (cuprija) and not the standard Serbo-Croatian word for bridge (most). Yet at the same time, the bridge resists this symbolism. It is not a bridge from the past to the future, or from the village to the wider world, or between Christian Europe and Muslim Turkey. It is simply a sturdy stone bridge. While the uncomplicated lives of the townsfolk dip and yaw in full color, and while the ponderous events of the outside world roll on in inscrutable ways, the bridge remains unchanged. The true symbols in the book are the rich and detailed characters who live and die by the Drina river. Each has something to tell us, and none is superfluous. These characters describe for us the consequences of conflict and cooperation in a comfortable little town caught in uncomprehending suffering by its location along one of history's great fault lines. The bridge... the bridge simply spans the Drina, as it always has.
Book Review: Bridges came from Allahs angels
Summary: 5 Stars
To write about Andric and his work, also means writing about fights (verbal ones) between Croatians, Serbs and Bosnians, which are lead to the present day over the fact whose author Andric really is. But that story is not for this place, so we shall skip it and we are going to turn our look towards these pages.Brige over Drina is not merely a sociologic study as you can read in some of the reviews, it, really is that, but only on a shallow scale, scale that could be seen with a first reading. Life on the border between Bosnia and Serbia, could be understood as a good theme for a socio-literate research, but Andric shoots much higher than that.
Bridge on Drina is neither the story about human destinies, though many are interwoven between it's pillars and the village beside it, human destinies are everywhere, so they are present even in this book, but the are not the main subject.
Bridge on Drina is story about people (not about their destinies), about passability of all things, even those who are meant to be infinite, without ending, and which couldn't be destroyed no matter how hard one could try, it's a stroy about Balcan, about specific way of life, life which does not hurry anywhere, in which "parties" are held all day long, in which one walks over bridge for hours, casually glancing on a water beneath, exchanging few words, and gossips with people who do the same, it's a life of a little people in a "barren wasteland" of borderland, which was never independent, but always under some other rule, being Turkish, or German one, which influenced on society, and changed ways of life from it's roots.
In contrary with a modern Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian prose, bridge over drina posess an exemplary style and language, very easy understandeable and fluent, which occupies ones perception with a tones of a nostalgia which jumps from every syllable in the book.
You could find critics in this book, you could find wondering, but over all that you shall find bridge as a symbol of link between nations on a much deeper scale than merely connecting opposite sides of river. that bridge connects life of the people and from that bridge life became apparent in a village beside it.
This is a wonderfull book, definition of a fine arts, though I have a feeling that much of familiarity and warmth is lost in english translation, so I encourage all of you out there who posses adequate understanding of slavic laguages to read this book in original.
Read it, than let it rest, than read it again, than let it rest again, and so on, and so on...
Book Review: The Past is Prologue
Summary: 5 Stars
Ivo Andric describes the life and times of the people of Visegrad, a small riverside town in Bosnia, from 1516 to 1914. The novel begins as a boy from a nearby town is taken by force to serve the government in "Stambul". He rises in the ranks to Grand Viser (sic) and commands the construction of a bridge as a gift to his hometown.
The bridge not only provided a means to connect two parts of Visegrad, (an undependable ferry had been the only previous means) it was a vital part of the community. The bridge had a wide center, a "kapia" on which over the years was a scene for markets, gatherings, guard houses and sometimes was the site of life changing events. The history is told through tales of the townspeople; most tales involve the bridge. First there is the harsh life of construction workers, and later there are tales of gamblers, shop keepers, guards, floods, school teachers, students, hoteliers, peasants, dreamers and drunkards. The tales help the reader to envision the social life, customs and concerns of the people of this region and foreshadow what is to come.
The people of this town are vulnerable to decisions made far away. Policies of the Ottomans and later the Hapsburgs are administered in different ways, but the result is the same in that young males are conscripted and new taxes are levied. Like the bridge, a railroad and educational opportunities for the young bring more outside influence to the town, for better and for worse.
As Serbian insurgents threaten the larger powers, the strategic location of the town, its bridge, railroad and small Serbian population make it a battleground. Its people, most of whom have no political philosophy, respond to the new conditions in ways that fit their age, family needs or their ethnicity.
I read the 1977 University of Chicago Press volume. The cover features a representation of the bridge, but this one does fit the text. For one thing, it doesn't have the "kapia" which is essential to the story. At the bottom of some pages there are letters, p. 33 has a B; p. 65 a C; p. 97 a D, etc., with no explanation.
The prose has a fable like quality and is a pleasure to read. It helps to the reader to understand this region of the world. This has been called a masterpiece and it is apparent why this author received a Nobel Prize.