The Three-Arched Bridge (1978)

A sister to Ivo Andric's Bridge on the Drina. While Andric's novel is epic (One Hundred Years of Solitude, but better), spanning centuries, this novel is done in miniature.

Told in the accounts of a monk's journal, Kadare advances each chapter as if he were placing a stone into the edifice of archways and supports that make up a bridge. There is a casualness to the prose, and as the chapters stack up, I couldn't stop thinking about what the monk sees and feels happening to his people; that this complicated and blunt act of constructing a bridge over a river (progress), leaves the beloved old ways and past behind, as if a people's history is unceremoniously immured in the bridge's pilings.

Forgive me. Bridges propagate metaphors. They invite them. This is one of their purposes.


I could also just say of Kadare and The Three Arched Bridge: he is a wise author and this is a beautiful book. ( )

The year: 1377. The place: the Balkan peninsula. 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 endeavor, 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.

Despite the book’s description, there’s actually a pretty solid storyline in the book. The book isn’t gloomy either –something I’ve come to expect from Balkan authors – but is a historical novel that breathes the medieval atmosphere. The characterizations are excellent, the voice of the monk is sublime. The ending had a great surprise and was icing on the cake. This book wholly deserves its five stars! ( )

Partant d'une vieille légende (la construction d'un pont au 14e siècle, en Albanie) l'auteur montre 'l'articulation du légendaire et du politique'. Il prend le ton exact d'un chroniqueur des temps anciens.

In the late fourteenth century a mysterious foreign organisation gains permission from the local count to build a bridge over a wild river on the old Roman Via Egnatia, angering the people, just as mysterious and foreign to the locals, who run the raft crossing. The problems with the bridge's building become tangled up with sinister local legends, the underlying need to move large amounts of pitch hints at an approaching war, and there is always the threat of the nearby Turks who are beginning to look westwards. Excellent stuff. ( )

Sometimes the best stories are those that are told simply, without flash or Hollywood-style suspense. The Three-Arched Bridge is that kind of story. It’s told in the form of a chronicle, narrated by a medieval Christian monk named Gjon.

On one level the novel is about the competition between, what are essentially, two companies. Boats & Rafts transport the people across the river. Roads & Bridges arrives to build a bridge to take the people over it. The two opposing sides attempt to influence their potential customers with propaganda and espionage – utilizing legend and local superstition. It sounds dry and boring, yet is anything but. After the bridge is repeatedly sabotaged, Roads & Bridges employs bards to re-work an old ballad and twist it to their purposes: about an oath made by three brothers and of the bride of the youngest who is walled up alive within the foundations of a castle. She is a sacrifice to prevent its walls from crumbling.

But like much of Kadare’s work, this is a story that functions on multiple levels. The monk, Gjon, is a more complex character than he originally seems. He comes across as deliberately naive, unwilling to grasp the implications of the information to which he is privy. For example, it is he who discusses the old ballad with a representative of Roads & Bridges during a series of seemingly casual walks along the banks of river. Not until it is too late does he understand the reason behind the man’s curiosity, or discover the macabre purpose to which a folk story will be twisted.

Interspersed within the tale is news of the last gasps of the Byzantine Empire – the defensive line of Christian Europe against the Islamic Turks. What is so brilliant is that Kadare makes this the secondary storyline, always in the background of Gjon’s narrative. Gjon’s attention, and ours, remain focused on events which take place closer to home. It’s an example of man’s tunnel vision; how history often happens without our truly understanding the significance of events as they occur. Because, in the end, what we know as history is only a series of incidents that have been put into perspective.

Ismail Kadare divided The Three-Arched Bridge into short chapters – most are 5 pages or less. These bursts of information convey a sense of real time passing. The breaks in the narrative are the storyteller editing out what he feels is irrelevant to his tale. But, of course, everything is relevant. The reader realizes this early on and, in my mind, that realization makes for a better book. It’s fun to know more than the narrator; to understand that the bridge is a mere footnote in a bigger story. One that cannot be escaped or avoided, regardless of whether we want to pay attention to it or not. ( )