The Bridge Over the Drina

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With humor and compassion, Ivo Andrić chronicles the ordinary Christians, Jews, and Muslims whose lives are connected by the bridge, in a land that has itself been a bridge between East and West for centuries. Ivan "Ivo" Andrić (Cyrillic: Иво Андрић), a native Bosnian, composed short stories, mainly with life under the Ottoman Empire. His house in Travnik now functions as a museum. His flat on Andrićev Venac in Belgrade hosts the museum of and the foundation. 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… A great stone bridge built three centuries ago in the heart of the Balkans by a Grand Vezir of the Ottoman Empire dominates the setting of Andric's stunning novel.

The bridge is built and it becomes a witness of history… And it becomes an inanimate partaker in all the events around it… And it mutely participates in lives of those who surround it… 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.

The Bridge on the Drina

In 1961, people awarded him "for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country." He donated the money to libraries in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Among them is that of the bridge’s builder, a Serb kidnapped as a boy by the Ottomans; years later, as the empire’s Grand Vezir, he decides to construct a bridge at the spot where he was parted from his mother. A workman named Radisav tries to hinder the construction, with horrific consequences. Later, the beautiful young Fata climbs the bridge’s parapet to escape an arranged marriage, and, later still, an inveterate gambler named Milan risks everything on it in one final game with the devil.

After the Second World War, he spent most of his time in his home at Belgrade, held ceremonial posts in the Communist government, and served as a parliamentarian of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He also joined as a member of the Serbian academy of sciences and arts.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?) book of 2021. Artist for this review is Serbian painter Nadežda Petrović, between photographs of the real-life setting of the novel.

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. Dentro de esta gran novela se agrupan innumerables sub-historias menores (menores por el tamaño, no por la calidad). Un ramillete de cuentos y relatos de las culturas musulmana, judía sefardí y cristiana ortodoxa. Costumbres, leyendas y anécdotas de esa difícil convivencia que supuso históricamente una zona tan conflictiva (no tanto por la pacífica convivencia de culturas y religiones tan diferentes, como ocurrió en España hace siglos, sino por por los intereses geopolíticos y de los diferentes "imperios" a lo largo del tiempo) como esa frontera de la Bosnia natal del autor, pasando de manos turcas, a austro-húngaras, luego a las serbias. Por cierto interesante también lo que tiene de histórico y el conocimiento que facilita de ese territorio de los Balcanes tan complejo. De forma novelada, más entretenido por cierto.A diferencia de por ejemplo "Los pilares de la tierra" o "Cien años de soledad", en que una rama familiar se va sucediendo y ve pasar el transcurso de los años y hace de nexo de unión de la historia, aquí me sorprendió que ese nexo fuera exclusivamente ese puente magnífico, que ve pasar religiones, culturas, cambios de estados, guerras y un largo etcétera de grandes historias, que de no ser por el puente podrían parecer historias inconexas, siendo el puente, la ciudad y el entorno los que le dan la ligazon que necesita la historia. Ivo Andrić is almost like a Balkan "Mark Twain" so great were his powers of observation about human nature, sometimes wryly so. You can not read this book without feeling he has an enormous love for humanity because he can describe people at their worst, their weakest, and best with such compassion and grace, it's impossible not to love his writing for that fact alone. I found myself writing down sentences within the book just to savor their genius later. After I finished the book, I looked the author up on Wikipedia and I realized I had no idea while reading the book what faith he was because he wrote about the Christian and Muslim villagers with such insight you could almost think he had both faiths in his family. Ah, such is the Balkans. Banac, Ivo (1984). The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-9493-2. The three novels Andrić published in 1945 were an immediate success. [23] The Bridge on the Drina was instantly recognized as a classic by the Yugoslav literary establishment. [17] The novel played an important role in shaping Andrić's Tito-era reputation as the very embodiment of Yugoslav literature, a "living equivalent to Njegoš". [40] From its publication in 1945 until the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991–92, the novel was required reading in Yugoslav secondary schools. [41]