The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
Penguin $30
Julie Orringer's first book, a stunning short-story collection entitled How To Breathe Underwater, was a New York Times notable book. At around 600 pages, her eagerly anticipated novel is in direct contrast to the elegance of brevity, but I have fallen under the spell of its considerable reach.
The
Invisible Bridge takes you back in time to Paris and Budapest on the cusp of World War II and the horrific years and events that unfold. What makes this novel supremely captivating is the way history is illuminated on the level of the everyday. Ordinary lives, ordinary routines, extraordinary changes.
With sumptuous detail that reminds me of novels of another century, Orringer traces the lives of a Jewish Hungarian family from their small village to the studios of Paris to enforced labour camps.
Andreas Levi receives a scholarship to attend a Parisian school of architecture where he wants to design buildings for ordinary people, not the well-off. His older brother goes to Rome to study medicine while his younger brother tries acting. Andreas posts a secret letter in Paris and becomes unexpectedly and inextricably involved with the recipient.
The first section of the novel is an exploration of the threads that bind us when we love: resilient, vulnerable, testing. The relationship between Klara and Andreas remains a significant core of the novel. There is, too, the heart-warming drive of the impoverished young student to engage with ideas, both new and old.
What gives the novel its arresting tension is the way the political upheaval slowly creeps around the narrative fringes. Life goes on and the world might be on the verge of falling apart. The tragic events and consequences are now so much a part of our literature and historical analysis I want to shout out to the characters that there is a monster in the wings.
The Jewish brothers are floundering in the normality of the life that goes on as they absorb the racist insults, the filtered media reports, the word-of-mouth rumours. It is only when they get first-hand accounts of dreadful things, the ominous signs become real.
Orringer gives dimensions to a critical time in history. Her characters remind us that when you are snared in the curves and side roads of a particular time it is not easy to make sense of that time.
She refuses to view history and its players in simplistic divisions of good and evil but introduces the little resistances. There is the newspaper that Andreas and his friend use to make fun of their captors without alienating them. There is the Hungarian inspector who challenges the racist behaviour. There is the general who resists the German line.
Orringer's invisible bridge is a fiction designed by Andreas to send the army into a chasm. I also see it as the glue that holds people together in the face of unspeakable difficulties.
It is the bridge made up of the common values of respect, dignity and goodwill, and from which we find the collective strength to rise above atrocity. This book is a gift that enabled me to hold a particular time to the light and see it anew. It is worth reading.
Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.
