400 Year of Social Interaction
The Bridge on the Drina: A Book Review by Charlie Marlin
I was looking for a novel, and The Bridge on the Drina seemed promising. Published in 1945, it won Ivo Andrić the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. I had never heard of it, which was a plus. Capsule reviews were generally favorable. Some suggested that “novel” even “historical novel” was not really the right genre, but they couldn’t think of a better one.
The book centers on a bridge over the Drina River in Bosnia. We learn that it was built by a Turkish vizier in the 1500s, near an area where Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox faiths intermingled. It was intended to connect that region to the center of Turkish power in Istanbul. It still stands, and looks elegant on Google Maps.
The novel has no single character or family that persists throughout the narrative, other than the bridge. Over the centuries of its existence, we learn about a wide variety of people. We are introduced to several families who play their vibrant parts and then vanish. I was disconcerted at first by this profusion of passing actors, but I eventually understood that the project of the novel is an attempt to convey the character of a region and its people over a time span of centuries.
We meet dozens of people as they engage with their neighbors and the circumstances around them. Some are bizarre. Some seem wearyingly mundane. All are believable when seen through the lens of memory. There are joys, triumphs, tragedies, absurdities, surprises. We learn many details about how ordinary people struggled or glided through daily life, what they felt loyalty toward, and their modes of relating to each other. The book provides revealing insight into the variety of ways that people with different religions cooperate (and don’t).
One theme addresses the tensions of development. Different characters take advantage of “progress” or are swept away by it and carried into a world they do not recognize. I gained a better understanding of the people in the United States in 2021 who feel left behind by social and economic changes, as well as the individuals in the vanguard of change – irreverent, intellectual, overstimulated mostly young people – who lead the charge to move fast and break things.
I relived parts of 1970. In those days I knew some in the vanguard, but I knew many more who were left behind. I could feel the consternation of the older folks who had been my Sunday School teachers. In some cases, their reaction was simple fear and nostalgia. Some others made earnest attempts to comprehend what the changes meant and how a life worth living could be achieved in this new world. I thought some of my peers on the leading edge were dangerously overconfident in their interpretations of society. But youth feel glee when outraging the old. “We have found a better way!” “Did you see that guy’s face when he saw me?!? He was freaked!” Ivo Andrić brings to light the same earnest consternations and gleeful pranks, self-blinding avoidance and agitated dread, that I saw in 1970 and see again today.
It astounds me that the novel was published over 75 years ago. Its narrative ends in 1914, shortly after the beginning of World War I. With the prescience of great art, it speaks truth for today as it describes variety and nuance in the human experience of change and continuity.