The invisible bridge: a novel

✍ Scribed by Julie Orringer

• Publisher: Vintage
• Year: 2010;2011
• Tongue: en-GB
• Weight: 439 KB
• Edition: 1st Vintage books ed
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

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.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, May 2010 : Even if this weren't her first novel, Julie Orringer's Invisible Bridge would be a marvelous achievement. Orringer possesses a rare talent that makes a 600-page story--which, we know, must descend into war and genocide--feel rivetingly readable, even at its grimmest. Building vivid worlds in effortless phrases, she immerses us in 1930s Budapest just as a young Hungarian Jew, Andras Lévi, departs for the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris. He hones his talent for design, works backstage in a theater, and allies with other Jewish students in defiance of rising Nazi influence. And then he meets Klara, a captivating Hungarian ballet instructor nine years his senior with a painful past and a willful teenage daughter. Against Klara's better judgment, love engulfs them, drowning out the rumblings of war for a time. But inevitably, Nazi aggression drives them back to Hungary, where life for the Jews goes from hardship to horror. As in Dr. Zhivago , these lovers can't escape history's merciless machinery, but love gives them the courage to endure. --Mari Malcolm

From Bookmarks Magazine

Given the novel's size and subject matter, critics can be forgiven for their initial skepticism over a 600-plus page book on the Holocaust--by a first-time novelist, no less. But they were very pleasantly surprised--astonished, even--at Orringer's beautifully rendered novel, which most believed, with its "sweep akin to that of Dr. Zhivago " (New York Times)__ and other classics, is destined to become a modern-day classic itself. Although one critic felt the novel could have used a more aggressive editor and others noted some overwrought language, most described The Invisible Bridge as a beautifully researched, old-fashioned love story, "the type Tolstoy might have scratched out with a gnawed pencil" (Onion AV Club). Four stars, or four-and-a-half stars? Only time will tell if we gave it a half too few.