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Summary: Change Comes to Medieval Albania
Comment: It is the Spring of 1378 and change is a foot in the Balkan Peninsula. The Byzantine Empire is in steady decline and the Ottoman Turks are surging. Christendom is devided and unable to check the Ottoman's steady advance. Meanwhile in an Albanian backwater, outsiders have come to build a bridge across a strategically important river.
On the surface, "The Three Arched Bridge" is the story of the conflict surrounding the building of a stone bridge. However, this is a novel produced during the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. Like any well written Eastern European novel of the period, there is a deeper meaning interwoven into the threads of the text. The pleasure of this novel is teasing out the allegory that Kadare has so skillfully placed into his novel.
Ismail Kadare is a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature and he is also the innaugural winner of the Man Booker International Prize. "The Three Arched Bridge" is literature at its very best. Although I have some knowledge of Balkan history, this book would have been more enjoyable if my understanding of the region had been more profound.
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Summary: Read In Record Time
Comment: Surely, the record time it took me to read this book is an indication as to just how enjoyable it all was. Yes, a tale truly well told.
In the Albania of 1377, the monk-narrator, chronicles a legend surrounding the building of a bridge. But is that legend really a legend? Read and find out.
Though set in the distant past, and in a culture rather foreign to me, Ismail Kadare's skills as a storyteller and writer succeeds wonderfully in making one feel a part of it all.
Now, which of I. Kadare's other works to tackle next?!
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Summary: A Riveting Read that Will Engage Your Mind
Comment: Taken at face value, The Three-Arched Bridge is a story about the building of a strategically important bridge in 1377 as the Ottoman Empire expanded into southeastern Europe in the dying days of the Byzantine Empire. The local people do not welcome the change, in particular the `Boats and Rafts' company that ferries travelers back and forth across the Ujana e Keqe (`Wicked Waters'). Construction of the bridge is sabotaged, but by whether by human means or by `naiads' or water nymphs is subject to debate. It appears the bridge may fail altogether until an old myth of walling up a woman in the wall of a castle comes to a twisted reality when one of the masons is `immured' in the bridge.
Kadare's narrator, Gjon, is a local monk with a skill for languages who serves as translator at various key meeting. The monk exhibits a sharp eye for detail. He travels nears an encampment of Turks and returns greatly fearing their advance. They are foreign in worship, dress, and song (Their music is `hashish dissolved in the air').
Kadare's writing entrances the reader. In a way that this reader found reminiscent of Flannery O`Connor, once the book has been begun, it must be finished. It's been called `strange, vivid, ominous' by Patrick McGrath in the NYT Book Review and I can't do better than that. A sense of foreboding, if not outright dread lingers over the pages.
Kadare's story seemingly contains an analogy, but what it is, is not obvious to the Western, or perhaps simply non-Albanian reader. It has been suggested that the analogy is to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the book was originally published a decade earlier in Albania in 1978, although it was not published in English until 1997. Others have suggested a resonance with the Kosovo-Serbia conflicts and that rings truer because of the long history of that conflict (the great Kosovo battle that Serbs tout occurred in 1398 just 12 years after the story of the bridge.). The simpler answer is that the book is a story about the history and mythology of the clash between the Ottomans and the Byzantines, Islam and Christian, Turks and European set a crucial time and place in that interaction.
Kadare himself is a controversial and enigmatic figure. He published books in Albania under the eye of dictator Enver Hoxha, but then fled to France in 1990 just when the regime was collapsing. His claim to dissident status is hotly debated. Moreover, English versions of his books have suffered in the past from being twice-interpreted: first from Albanian to French and then from French to English. The Arcade Publishing edition, however, was translated directly into English from Albanian.
Whatever you decide the analogy is or think about Kadare, his writing is arresting. Give The Three-Arched Bridge a try and see for yourself. Very highly recommended.
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Summary: A Dark, Allegorical Tale of a Balkan Legend
Comment: The year is 1377, the narrator is a monk named Gjon, and the place is an indeterminate area of Albania bordering the Turkish Ottoman Empire through which, over the years, have passed multiple armies of Crusaders heading for Jerusalem, followed later by defeated stragglers heading back to Europe. The particular locus of this story is a ferry crossing point on the river called Ujana e Keqe, or Wicked Waters, clearly a strategic point in the movement of peoples and troops between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. For ages, the only way to cross the Ujana has been by raft, piloted for a fee by a taciturn old humpback working in the employ of a firm called Boats and Rafts.
Life had gone unchanged in this place for as long as memory could trace, until one day a stranger falls into an epileptic fit at the ferry crossing, his arms flung wildly toward the water. An itinerant fortune-teller witnesses the event and claims that it is a sign from God that a bridge should be built at this spot. Three weeks later, two strangers mysteriously appear before the local lord, the count of the Gjikas, proposing the construction of a toll bridge from which the count will receive a portion of the proceeds. The count agrees, and plans proceed to build a three-arched bridge despite the fears of the locals and the certitude of the old woman Ajkuna that the river waters will not be tamed and the bridge is nothing more than the devil's backbone. Once the bridge construction begins, however, troubles follow that seem almost certainly to be the result of sabotage, presumably sponsored by Boats and Rafts. Regardless, the locals see evil omens in these troubles, perhaps the work of naiads and water nymphs revenging the insulted river.
At about the same time, Monk Gjon spends time talking about Balkan legends with one of the bridge builder representatives and happens to mention a wall that demanded a human sacrifice in order not to fall. According to the legend of the castle of Shkoder, three brothers, all masons, were building the walls, but every night, their day's work was destroyed. A wise man told them the wall required a human soul, so the brothers agreed to sacrifice one of their brides to be sealed into the castle wall. The sacrificed wife offers up a curse: O tremble, wall of stone, As I tremble in this tomb." Several days later, a ballad begins to be sung in the local inn, but the "wall of stone" has become a "bridge of stone" and the story gradually evolves into a legend that must be fulfilled. Not long after, a local mason named Murrash Zenebisha who is suspected of the sabotage is found dead, immured in the bridge with only his face and neck showing, his eyes still open. Work on the bridge continues apace without further disruption, and it gradually displaces the ferry (whose humpbacked operator soon dies of old age). Of course, Murrash Zenebisha will not be the last death accorded to this bridge, this area, or this country - as Monk Gjon observes, "the future seems to me pregnant only with terrible disasters."
Kadare tells this story with a grim fatalism, using the educated monk as the arbiter of causes and effects. Throughout, the monk suggests that events are being engineered by the interested parties, that epileptic seizures, weakened bridge supports, and ballads of water spirits and human sacrifices are primitive forms of truth manipulation and the propaganda that will become endemic to this area in future centuries. Of course, the bridge itself is metaphorical on several levels: as the connector of Europe with the Asian continent, as a precursor of war and conquest through its ability to advance armies, as a symbol of the Balkans themselves as such a bridge between the continents, and as a symbol of technology and change. The ancient highway through Albania is being bought up, one piece at a time, and refurbished to promote trade and commerce. The bridge over the Ujana e Keqe is of a piece with this modernization, the replacement of water transit by roadways and bridges. However, like all technology, fears of change must be overcome, old ways must be set aside, and (often) a price must be paid as a result of its impact on human life. Monk Gjon, observing the finished bridge, remarks that "human confidence, fear, suspicion, and madness were nowhere more clearly manifest than on its [the bridge's] back." The three arches themselves may reflect a Christian Trinity, but they can also be seen as Europe on one side, the Balkans in the peaking middle, and Ottoman Turkey/Asia on the other side.
In THE THREE-ARCHED BRIDGE, Ismail Kadare has masterfully employed the grim legends and history of Albania and the Balkans to create a macabre and captivating parable applicable to modern times. As he did with THE SUCCESSOR and THE PALACE OF DREAMS, Kadare demonstrates once again that he deserves a place alongside Eco, Saramago, Calvino, and Kundera.
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Summary: Long overdue for that Nobel Prize...
Comment: I loved the different symbols in the book. For example, Abdullah wanting to marry the Albanian girl. Although her parents rejected the offer, she had to eternally suffer being referred to as "the Turkish bride." Kadare wrote a very flexible book -- you can look at it in so many ways. Did I come upon some subtle hints of Kadare's nationalism? Yes, but the truth is that the book wouldn't have served its purpose otherwise. It was interesting that in the end it was not a woman, but a man, that ended up being immured; quite the opposite from the legend. Kadare is very eloquent in his descriptions. One that stuck to mind, very humorous in a Faulknerish type of way, was when they kept plastering the dead man's body with (what I think was) cement, the narrator -- the monk -- and the bystanders were so in shock/awe at the sight in front of them that it wouldn't have made a difference if the men started cementing them, as well.
If you're passionate about balkan history and literature appeals to you also, this is a book you shouldn't miss. All in all, it's a very nice introduction to Kadare for whoever is not familiar with him, although a more entertaining one would have to be by reading his other book, "Doruntine."
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