The Bridge Over the Drina
Ivo Andric
In the small Bosnian town of Visegrad the stone bridge of the novel's title, built in the sixteenth century on the instruction of a grand vezir, bears witness to three centuries of conflict. Visegrad has long been a bone of contention between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but the bridge survives unscathed until 1914, when the collision of forces in the Balkans triggers the outbreak of World War I.
The bridge spans generations, nationalities and creeds, silent testament to the lives played out on it. Radisav, a workman, tries to hinder its construction and is impaled alive on its highest point; beautiful Fata leaps from its parapet to escape an arranged marriage; Milan, inveterate gamble, risks all in one last game on it. With humour and compassion, Andric chronicles the lives of Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox Christians unable to reconcile their disparate loyalties.
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About Ivo Andric
Reviews for The Bridge Over the Drina
New Statesman
Despite its scale, what makes the book extraordinary is the tender insight with which it treats these individual lives, whether Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim or Jewish
Independent
Perhaps the most widely translated Yugoslav book since the last war is Ivo Andric's The Bridge on the Drina... No better example could have been selected with which to introduce the American public to contemporary Yugoslav prose
New York Times
The best kind of fictionalised history
Daily Telegraph
The wealth and variety of its fictional elements carry it so far beyond the confines of a straightforward novel, it cannot be limited to such a description. It puts one in mind of a collection of tales, but no collection of tales (not even A Thousand and One Nights or Washington Irving's stories) ever possessed such a unity and continuity of theme
Le Monde
Andric possess the rare gift in a historical novelist of creating a period-piece, full of local colour, and at the same time characters who might have been living today
Times Literary Supplement
Just as the bridge on the Drina brought East and West together so your work has acted as a link, combining the culture of your country with other parts of the planet