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Loading... The Invisible Bridge (original 2010; edition 2010)by Julie Orringer
Work InformationThe Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (2010)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Overall, I liked this book, though it could have done with some editing. (758 pages) It's inspired by the authors family history; which I think made the details seem a bit too precious to her. The book is about a Hungarian Jewish family and starts in 1937. So the whole book is very stressful, you start of wanting to shake the main character, Andras, and tell him to leave the continent. (not that that was easy at that point, but he could have tried!) But he didn't have foresight and so instead goes to Paris, studies architecture, and falls in love with a ballet dancer with a backstory. The depiction on 1937 Paris was interesting, and the plot involves a theater company, which is interesting. But of course, so stressful, and the Hungarian parts are more stressful still. Books about the Holocaust show us at our worse and our best. It's horrifying to read of the atrocities humans are capable of committing but it's also inspiring to read of the strength needed to survive those atrocities. What makes The The Invisible Bridge stand out for a lot of other Holocaust literature is that it's told from a point of view not often heard from; The Hungarian Jew. Hungary was an ally of Germany during World War Two but the Hungarian Jews were treated like animals and actually wished for Hitler's defeat. Sadly, when The Russians moved in and took over, it was a case of "Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss" Julie Orringer has written a compelling story about two Hungarian Jewish families: one wealthy and one poor, whose lives become intertwined when two of them fall in love in late 1930's Paris despite a significant gap in age. Andras Levi is lucky enough to win a scholarship to study architecture in Paris, but funding disappears causing him to seek work from a fellow Hungarian in the theater. The female lead sets him up with the daughter of a friend, who is beastly, but Andras falls in love with the mother, Claire Morgenstern (a/k/a Klara Hasz), who has fled her native land. They are lots of secrets to be revealed in the 600 pages, and they return to Hungary when Andras' visa is revoked. Andras is then conscripted while the Jewish world in Europe is crumbling under the Third Reich. This reminded me a little of Follett's Fall of Giants, but it is focused on fewer people and character development, rather than explaining world events. You know that a book is good when the second you finish it you quickly make a list in your mind of the people you need to tell about it or buy copies for. I felt this way about The Invisible Bridge. I feel a duty to share Ms. Orringer's story of her family with mine. These stories must continue to be told and re-told so that we, especially those of us who were born and raised in the United States and have never seen the ravages of the Second World War, will never forget what happens when avarice and self interest take precedence over our sense humanity.
"The Invisible Bridge" is a stunning first novel, not just in the manner that Orringer's acclaimed short stories seemed to predict, but in a wholly unexpected fashion. Her short fiction is resolutely contemporary, closely — almost obsessively — observed and firmly situated in the time and place we now inhabit. "The Invisible Bridge," by contrast, is in every admirable sense an "ambitious" historical novel, in which large human emotions — profound love, familial bonds and the deepest of human loyalties — play out against the backdrop of unimaginable cruelty that was the Holocaust. Ms. Orringer’s long, crowded book is its own kind of forest, and not every tree needs to be here; her novel’s dramatic power might have been greatly enhanced by pruning. But Andras’s most enduring wish, it turns out, is to create a kind of family memorial. And Ms. Orringer, writing with both granddaughterly reverence and commanding authority, has done it for him. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he promised to deliver. But when he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter's recipient, he becomes privy to a secret that will alter the course of his--and his family's--history. From the small Hungarian town of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in labor camps, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a family shattered and remade in history's darkest hour. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I coudn't leave this book till I had finished it. It's well written, and beautifully researched, though Orringer wears her learning lightly. I'll read more of her work. ( )