The Three-Arched Bridge, written in Albania between 1976 and 1978, is based on a myth of sacrifice and creation, which also appears in other works by Kadare, and is present in different versions throughout the Balkans.

The legend is about three brothers, all masons, whose efforts to build a castle were in vain because everything built during daytime was destroyed by an unknown force at night. After having unsuccessfully worked for a long time, the masons are told by a wise man that the construction will endure only if a human life is sacrificed, so the brothers decide to immure one of their brides in the foundations. The sacrifice should strike the first wife to come in the morning with the midday meal for her husband, and the youngest wife is consequently walled up alive, one breast left out so she can feed her infant even after her death.

According to the narrator of The Three-Arched Bridge, the monk Gjon, the kernel of the legend was the idea that all labor requires some kind of sacrifice, and the spilled blood is in fact sweat. But the legend becomes reality when the construction of a bridge demands a human life, and a mason is found immured in the bridge piers. Thus, the notion of sacrifice, which is at the core of the story, can be read in several ways: as a legend, as a crime done in the name of the bridge, as the idea that all human orders are founded on blood, and at the end of the novel, when the monk, author of “this chronicle, [which:] like the bridge itself, may demand a sacrifice,” announces his own sacrifice, as a commentary on the essence of great art, always built on the sacrifice of the artist.

Fascinating and enigmatic and strange. Kadare really draws you in, and the book is full of a dark sense of foreboding and a man's helplessness in the face of huge historical forces. I'm not sure I quite understand the full extent of the allegory meant by the bridge. The clearest thing I could draw out of it is the feeling of helplessness, of only being able to sit and watch and be baffled by the unfolding of history. ( )

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. ( )

A poor copy of Ivo Andric's Bridge Over The Drina. ( )