The Bridge Over the Drina

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Velikonja, Mitja (2003). Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press. ISBN 978-1-58544-226-3. Andric era uno appassionato di Leopardi e per tutta la lettura il Ponte sulla Drina, nonostante di manifattura umana, mi è apparso come il Vesuvio della Ginestra: inerte e incolpevole spettatore delle miserie umane, della loro storia.

Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, the bridge stands witness to the countless lives played out upon it: Radisav, the workman, who tries to hinder its construction and is impaled on its highest point; to the lovely Fata, who throws herself from its parapet to escape a loveless marriage; to Milan, the gambler, who risks everything in one last game on the bridge with the devil his opponent; to Fedun, the young soldier, who pays for a moment of spring forgetfulness with his life. War finally destroys the span, and with it the last descendant of that family to which the Grand Vezir confided the care of his pious bequest - the bridge. Patterson, Annabel (2014). The International Novel. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-21040-8.This book is way beyond my powers of reviewing, but I started reading it out of a sense of duty, to learn and understand more about the Balkan history and people, and then found myself completely enthralled with it. It's as if the author has found a way to assume a godlike role in depicting humanity - as if he had taken a brush and carefully swept out of their dusty corners the people of the town of Vi­­šegrad, as their turn comes to find their way in their corner of the world and in the march of time and wider events. They are brought forward from the shadows with compassion, but not pathos, and yet at the same time observed at a distance, as indicative of all humanity. The individuals he portrays have passed into legend or are fictional. Their turn in the limelight is brief, arduous, fraught with danger and often powerless - and how perfectly the last line of the book sums all this up! They are vividly brought to life in Ivo Andrič's eloquent and poetic exposition (and if even the translation is riveting, what must the original be like?) Ramadanović, Petar (2000). "Ivo Andrić 1892–1975: Bosnian Novelist and Short-Story Writer". In Classe, Olive (ed.). Encyclopedia of Literary Translation Into English: A-L. Vol.1. London, England: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-884964-36-7. Images and myths purport to the mythic. Ivo Andric crafted a monument to those expectations in his novel of stories. He challenges the eternal with a construct, much as engineers spanned the natural with bridges. Once present, the innovations often appear eternal, timeless. It is a sincere hope that The Bridge on the Drina enjoys that privilege. A vivid depiction of the suffering history has imposed upon the people of Bosnia from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of World War I, The Bridge on the Drina earned Ivo Andric the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. Wachtel, Andrew Baruch (1998). Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-3181-2.

Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn't, there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow, hard, bare and dark space a lot of us spend our lives.” In all his novels, Andrić is particularly interested in the characters whose ethnicity is marginalized or problematic or has undergone multiple historical vicissitudes. In The Bridge on the Drina such a character is Mehmed Pasha Sokolli, the Christian peasant snatched as a little boy by the Turks. Mehmed Pasha, one of many boys acquired in this forceful way, eventually becomes a Turkish vizier. Pained by the memory of his lost childhood and nationality, the vizier imagines the construction of a stone bridge in his hometown. This initiating story encapsulates the symbolic framing of the bridge. Spatially, the bridge is a meeting point metaphor, the location at which the diverse peoples get together and unite in its creation and protection. Temporally, the stone bridge is also a symbol of endurance of human creation as contrasted with the transient lives of those who have lived by it.In this masterpiece of historical fiction by the Nobel Prize-winning Yugoslavian author, a stone bridge in a small Bosnian town bears silent witness to three centuries of conflict. A vivid depiction of the suffering history has imposed upon the people of Bosnia from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of World War I, The Bridge on the Drina earned Andric the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961.

Nesreća nesrećnih ljudi i jeste u tome što za njih stvari koje su inače nemoguće i zabranjene postanu, za trenutak, dostižne i lake, ili bar tako izgledaju, a kad se jednom trajno usele u njihove želje, one se pokažu opet kao ono što jesu: nedostupne i zabranjene, sa svim posljedicama koje to ima po one koji za njima ipak posegnu. So, in the kapia(the terrace at the center of the bridge), 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 lasted and endured 'like the bridge on the Drina'." The novel's literary and historical significance was instrumental in persuading the Swedish Academy to award Andrić the Nobel Prize. [42] In his introduction to Andrić's acceptance speech, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences member Göran Liljestrand took note of the symbolic significance of the bridge and described Andrić as a unifying force. "Just as the bridge on the Drina brought East and West together," Liljestrand said, "so your work has acted as a link, combining the culture of your country with other parts of the planet." [43] Following Andrić's death in 1975, Slovene novelist Ivan Potrč wrote an obituary praising the Nobel Laureate. "Andrić did not merely write The Bridge on the Drina," Potrč remarked. "He built, is building and will continue to build bridges between our peoples and nationalities." [44]In that way it also reminded me of War and Peace, with its multifaceted elements of history and fiction, and I suppose the same for Les Misérables for its Waterloo dissection, etc. It also felt somewhat Sebaldian... All those books that do not fit so neatly into one category. These are my favourite sorts of novels. Time flies, centuries pass by… Empires rise and empires fall… Times of peace and times of war… Times of tranquility and times of tumult… And man must adjust to any changes or perish… The story begins with the idea of a "blood tax," in which the Ottomans took a young Christian boy from his mother to serve their own empire. The boy in question in this novel is converted to Islam and is renamed Mehmed. The last time he sees his mother is when she is crying for him as he is taken away on a ferry on the Drina River. Aleksić, Tatjana (2013). The Sacrificed Body: Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-7913-5. The Bridge on the Drina is a historical novel by Ivo Andric. As the title implies, it is the story of a bridge, ranging from its construction to its use to, finally, its demise. Andric uses this bridge as a metaphor for the relations between the people on either side of the bridge.