The Invisible Bridge

Zusatztext 77473991 Informationen zum Autor Julie Orringer is the author of the award-winning short-story collection How to Breathe Underwater! which was a New York Times Notable Book . She is the winner of The Paris Review ’s Discovery Prize and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts! Stanford University! and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn! where she is researching a new novel. Klappentext Orringer's astonishing first novel is a grand love story and an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are torn apart by war. An unforgettable story of history and love! of marriage tested by disaster! of a Jewish family's struggle against annihilation! and of the dangerous power of art in a time of war. CHAPTER ONE A Letter Later he would tell her that their story began at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, the night before he left for Paris on the Western Europe Express. The year was 1937; the month was September, the evening unseasonably cold. His brother had insisted on taking him to the opera as a parting gift. The show was Tosca and their seats were at the top of the house. Not for them the three marble-arched doorways, the façade with its Corinthian columns and heroic entablature. Theirs was a humble side entrance with a red-faced ticket taker, a floor of scuffed wood, walls plastered with crumbling opera posters. Girls in knee-length dresses climbed the stairs arm in arm with young men in threadbare suits; pensioners argued with their white-haired wives as they shuffled up the five narrow flights. At the top, a joyful din: a refreshment salon lined with mirrors and wooden benches, the air hazy with cigarette smoke. A doorway at its far end opened onto the concert hall itself, the great electric-lit cavern of it, with its ceiling fresco of Greek immortals and its gold-scrolled tiers. Andras had never expected to see an opera here, nor would he have if Tibor hadn’t bought the tickets. But it was Tibor’s opinion that residence in Budapest must include at least one evening of Puccini at the Operaház. Now Tibor leaned over the rail to point out Admiral Horthy’s box, empty that night except for an ancient general in a hussar’s jacket. Far below, tuxedoed ushers led men and women to their seats, the men in evening dress, the women’s hair glittering with jewels. “If only Mátyás could see this,” Andras said. “He’ll see it, Andráska. He’ll come to Budapest when he’s got his baccalaureate, and in a year he’ll be sick to death of this place.” Andras had to smile. He and Tibor had both moved to Budapest as soon as they graduated from gimnázium in Debrecen. They had all grown up in Konyár, a tiny village in the eastern flatlands, and to them, too, the capital city had once seemed like the center of the world. Now Tibor had plans to go to medical college in Italy, and Andras, who had lived here for only a year, was leaving for school in Paris. Until the news from the École Spéciale d’Architecture, they had all thought Tibor would be the first to go. For the past three years he’d been working as a salesclerk in a shoe store on Váci utca, saving money for his tuition and poring over his medical textbooks at night as desperately as if he were trying to save his own life. When Andras had moved in with him a year earlier, Tibor’s departure had seemed imminent. He had already passed his exams and submitted his application to the medical school at Modena. He thought it might take six months to get his acceptance and student visa. Instead the medical college had placed him on a waiting list for foreign students, and he’d been told it might be another year or two before he could matriculate. Tibor hadn’t said a word about his own situation since Andras had learned of his scholarship, nor had he shown a trace o...

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Praise for Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge

"One of the best books of the year."
-Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"If you're still looking for a 'big' novel to carry into the summer holidays-one in which you can lose yourself without the guilty suspicion that you're slumming-then Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge is the book you want. . . . Stunning. . . . 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. . . . Orringer traverses this perilous rhetorical terrain with remarkable-and, more important, convincing, self-possession. . . . Remarkably affecting. . . . A life powerfully, unsentimentally and inspiringly evoked in this gracefully written and altogether remarkable first novel."
-Tim Rutten, The Los Angeles Times

"The Invisible Bridge deserves to be praised. It takes the introspective themes we've loved so well in American literature-from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself to A. M. Homes's Music for Torching-and points them in a different direction. . . . Rendered in sweeping, epic fashion . . . a close look at the terrible ways that enormous historical events can affect individual lives. . . . The strength of The Invisible Bridge lies in Orringer's ability to make us care so deeply about the people of her all-too-real fictional world."
-Andrew Ervin, The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

"Evocative . . . exquisitely precise . . . rapturous . . . uses history as a backdrop to her story's grand passions with a sweep akin to that of Dr. Zhivago. . . . The horrors of war never become Ms. Orringer's primary subject. She devotes far more attention to conveying the intricacies of Jewish life . . . writing with both granddaughterly reverence and commanding authority."
-Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"Intricately layered. . . . We have seen images like these . . . in the literature of eyewitnesses such as Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész. . . . [Orringer makes] brilliant use of a deliberately old-fashioned realism to define individual fates engulfed by history's deadly onrush. . . . With its moving acknowledgment of the gap between what's been lost and what can be imagined, this remarkably accomplished first novel is itself, in the continuing stream of Holocaust literature, an invisible bridge."
-Donna Rifkind, The Washington Post Book World

"Truly breathtaking . . . gloriously rendered . . . a sensual feast. . . . I didn't want it to end."
-Debra Spark, San Francisco Chronicle

"A straightforward storyteller, [Orringer] captures our attention with her sympathetic characters and lets her deft handling of time and place do the rest. She never indulges in melodrama. In her hands, the human drama, pared to its essentials, is heartbreaking-and inspiring-enough."
-Lloyd Sachs, Chicago Sun-Times

"Haunting. . . . [The Invisible Bridge] exhibits wonderfully evoked realism. . . . A literary throwback of sorts, a fat facsimile of a nineteenth-century novel, the kind of story that critics would faintly praise as 'sweeping' (commonly meaning they write it off in other respects) were the author not so obviously endowed with talent, and the novel's particularities so vibrant."
-Art Winslow, The Chicago Tribune

"Dazzling . . . Like Tolstoy and Stendhal, she chronicles sea changes in European history through the eyes of finely fashioned characters, and like them she has created a story simultaneously epic and intimate. . . . An ambitious slice of literature, but Orringer fulfills her ambitions with crisp writing. . . . This stunning work manages to feel both original and part and parcel of the well-blazed tradition of historical novels that came before it."
-Keith Staskiewicz, Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A)

"Bold, ambitious . . . beautiful, breathtaking and vital. . . . Orringer's prose is unfaltering, and she sh

Product details

• Authors: Julie Orringer
• Publisher: Knopf
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 04.05.2010
• EAN: 9781400041169
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-4116-9
• No. of pages: 560
• Dimensions: 167 mm x 244 mm x 37 mm
• Series: ALFRED A. KNOPF
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature