The Bridge on the Drina (Phoenix Fiction) Paperback – August 15, 1977

I am new to this author and to the area of the World it describes. Andric skillfully spans three centuries of the bridge and its effect on the area and its peoples. A confluence of urban and rural and Turkey and Hungary and Austria, and Jew and Muslim and Christian.and various Balkan communities.
A full plate indeed. All this interplay is masterfully crafted through a variety of individual and community stories. I read it in two sessions having to pause to reflect and consider so many issues that are raised. I have already recommended this to four friends. I wonder what I miss in translation,
but I am glad to have read it. Double glad that read a book from apart of the world with which I was unfamiliar. Though from a time past I found many issues germane to our current time. Do yourself a favor and read it.

This is a novel I would highly, highly recommend. I started reading "The Bridge on the Drina" almost on a whim, and from the first pages I was captivated. Seamlessly and breathtakingly, Andrić juxtaposes the noble, forceful grandeur of an epic with the warm intimacy of a novel. He shows the rise and fall of men, the birth and fulfillment of destinies, at the same time as he takes the reader on a friendly walk through Višegrad, stopping to admire the old houses and to greet the peasants who inhabit them. He sweeps the reader through four hundred years of rich, tumultuous history, infusing his book with every human emotion along the way.
People often speak of "the soul of a nation". This is exactly what Andrić conveys in "The Bridge on the Drina": he tells of countless lives, countless souls experiencing love and hate and laughter and heartbreak, which together form the great soul of his beloved country (to him, this was Yugoslavia). Somehow, his story is both as broad as a nation and as quiet and simple as that nation's most unassuming inhabitants. It is as luxuriously metaphoric as it is stark and realistic. Its flavor is uniquely Serbian; its words are universal. Reading this book is like living; there is no emotion, no experience which it does not contain.

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.

Historical narrative or fiction? The author quotes imagined conversations of people lost to history or created by the author as typical personalities and characters, so I guess this qualifies as fiction, and it is certainly written (and translated) in a approachable style. However, it is also firmly grounded in the history of the many personalities and peoples who have traveled through, settled in and contended over this corner of Europe -- Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Jews, Greeks, Turks, Austrians, Italians, Germans, Roma, Hungarians, Bulgarians, et al, unfortunately stopping shortly after the outbreak of World War One, leaving the reader begging for more than these 301 pages divided into 24 relatively short chapters. But then, perhaps the detailed description of impalement in the early pages is sufficiently graphic without moving the reader through the brutalities that occurred during World War Two, when this book was written.

As a diplomat in former Yugoslavia and its present-day remnants, to read and then put ones feet on the ground that Ivo Andric (a former diplomat, too) wrote about is enough to make me go back again and again to those hallowed places. It should be noted that the translation is superb, as reading it in the original Serbo-Croatian is a challenge even for the most gifted linguists of the languages of that marvelous mileu that has now become seven separate countries. When anyone interested in the Foreign Service asks me for good reads, this is always on it, even though Andric's description of impaling prisoners alive is something that can come back to haunt you in the middle of the night. While Andric's large body of literature is clearly deserving of reading, this clearly was the epic work that most deservedly won him the Nobel Prize.