The Three-Arched Bridge - Softcover

Kadare, Ismail; Hodgson, John

3.85

1,415 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375700943 ISBN 13: 9780375700941

Publisher: Vintage Books, 1998

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Albania's greatest living writer tells a parable of the violence sweeping over his native country, involving an odd bridge on the frontier of the advancing Ottoman Empire and its ominous significance. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

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Review:

The year: 1377. The place: the Balkan peninsula. Here in Ismail Kadare's novel, The Three-Arched Bridge, an Albanian monk chronicles the events surrounding the construction of a bridge across a great river known as Ujana e Keqe, or "Wicked Waters". If successful in their endeavour, the bridge-builders will challenge a monopoly on water transportation known simply as "Boats and Rafts". The story itself parallels developments in modern-day Eastern Europe, with the bridge emblematic of a disintegrating economic and political order: just as mysterious cracks in the span's masonry endanger the structure and cast the local community into a morass of uncertainty, superstition and murder, so the fast-changing conditions in the 14th-century Balkan peninsula threaten to overwhelm the stability of life there. Dark as the story itself is, Mr. Kadare's prose, skilfully translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson, is elegant, witty and deft. And with so many twists and turns in its carefully constructed plot, this political parable keeps the reader's interest to the very end.

Review:

"A vivid, macabre and wise novel" (New York Times)

"His ability to spin eerie parables out of a little-known national history makes his books an addictive pleasure" (Jonathan Romney Independent on Sunday)

"A compelling investigation into language and myth, politics and power, by the renowned, infinitely talented Albanian novelist" (Booklist)

"[Kadare] is seemingly incapable of writing a book that fails to be interesting" (New York Times)

"In Ismail Kadare's fictional worlds creation and destruction are entwined, and how he illuminates the human cost of their varied pairings is the source of his greatness as a writer" (Chicago Tribune)

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