The Three-Arched Bridge - Softcover

Kadare, Ismail

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860464637 ISBN 13: 9781860464638

Publisher: Harvill Press, 1998

Synopsis

The bards who stopped at the inn near the riverbank were forever being asked to sing the ballad of the three young masons, all brothers, who were fated never to complete the building of their wall until they had immured one of their wives in it.

In the year 1377, when the roadbuilders threatened to put the ferrymen out of business by building a stone bridge to carry the traffic between the Balkans and the rest of Europe, the legend was to become a grisly reality.

What the builders completed of the bridge by day was destroyed by night. Sabotage, said some. The vengeful spirits of the waters, said others. But once a man was taken to be immured, once he was plastered into a cavity of the first pier, the attacks on the bridge stopped, the two banks of the river had a permanent link. The first troops to cross the bridge were to be the vanguard of the Ottoman Turks advancing irresistably into Europe.

Many have described the retreat of Christendom after the fall of Constantinople, as Islam forced a passage westwards through the Balkans towards the European heartlands. Seldom, though, has the story been told so starkly, so hauntingly, as in this succinct fable of conflict, terror, dissention and superstition by Albania's most influential novelist.

About this title

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:

"The bridge is a foreboding, an omen, a threat. It is a bridge over which Asia will invade Europe and the future will invade the past. Kadare, an Albanian, has used the materials at hand to become one of Europe's great writers" (Los Angeles Times)

"An utterly captivating yarn: strange, vivid, ominous, macabre and wise" (New York Times)

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

"Kadare and Andric share a sense of incisive imagery, all too relevant, in which a Balkan bridge links present and future, at the sacrifice of humanity" (Boston Globe)

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1860464637
• ISBN 13: 9781860464638
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176