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The legend of the three brothers, who immured one of their wives in a constantly sabotaged wall, is brought to a horrible reality as the company constructing the new bridge offer substantial renumeration to those that would sacrifice themselves for the sake of progress. Set in the late 14th Century, the book echoes down the corridors of time, realising several modern day parallels which are frankly enough to frighten one into putting the book down. Yet I urge you not to; this is an important landmark in world literature, and one of the best novels I have read in a very long time. You will not be disappointed.
"The Three Arched Bridge," written by Kadare in the early 1980's, is a complex, multi-layered examination of Albania on the eve of the Ottoman invasion of the 14th century. Some of the horror of the story comes from knowing what happened in real life; the Ottomans arrived and didn't leave for five centuries, leaving behind a people with no connections to the outside world and little development to fall back on. Even worse, the Ottomans converted the majority of Albanians to Islam, further alienating the Albanian people from Christian Europe.
The story is couched as a history of the bridge built over the Ujama e Keqe River (translated as "Wicked Waters"). The writer of this journal is a Christian monk named Gjon, who acts as a translator to the local Albanian nobility. During the construction of the bridge, all sorts of sinister activities take place: foreigners arrive to build the bridge, the bridge is sabotaged, and a gruesome sacrifice in which a local man is plastered into the bridge takes place. During the construction of the bridge, the Albanian nobility fight amongst themselves while the Ottoman threat looms in the distance.
This is a grim story, full of drama and suspense. The nobility can never get their act together to unite and protect Albania against foreign threat. Even the family of the man plastered into the bridge fight amongst themselves for his estate. This disunity serves to weaken Albania and invites foreign conquest. The bridge represents many things: Albania as a bridge between Europe and Asia, the bridge between two ages, the old Medieval Europe and the emerging mercantile Europe, or even the dominance of foreign influence over the Albanian people. I think Kadare used the river to symbolize Albania. When the foreigners come to build the bridge, they spread mud from the riverbed all over the place. This is exactly what foreign powers did in real life; they drew up borders and left Albanian people scattered all over the region. With this intrepretation in mind, there are numerous other examples that emerge in the book.
Whatever the symbolic implications of this book, it is a great read. Kadare is dramatic without ever drifting into soap opera, and he creates characters with great depth in a minimum of words. If he keeps writing his awesome tales, I'll keep reading them. Give this one a chance; you will like it immensely.
A Christian monk, writing in the 14th century, might have seen the Turks as a threat, though animosity between Rome and Byzantium was worse than between Islam and Christianity. That is not to say that everyone at the time did see them like that. Many Christian peasants of southeastern Europe preferred to live under the less-rapacious, better-organized Ottomans. Many even gladly converted to Islam. So, although the Turks are portrayed as menacing in this novel, even as symbolic of death and disaster, I would like to point out that Albanian history has been re-written in the 19th and 20th centuries to suit those who opposed the decayed Turkish rule four centuries after the initial conquests. We are still dealing in legends, in other words. Kadare does not vary from nationalist history, which has to be seen for the legend it is. Other than that minor criticism, this is without doubt a five-star book. My only question is---when is Kadare going to get a Nobel Prize ?
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.
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