Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina (University of Chicago Press, 1977)
Starling Lawrence, Montenegro (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997)
I first encountered renowned Bosnian Serb novelist, activist, historian and diplomat Ivo Andric (1892-1975) when I began looking around for books about the Ottoman Empire a couple of years ago. That initial search yielded The Days of the Consuls, which I found in a paperback translation published in Belgrade in 2000. That novel takes place during 1807-1814, when consuls from Paris and Vienna took up residence in the Bosnian town of Travnik, northwest of Sarajevo, joining a Vizier who represented, of course, the Sultan in Istanbul. In it, Andric does a splendid job of portraying the ways people in remote postings attempt, not always with success, to reconcile their local strategies and relationships to the shifting demands of a distant polity.
I discovered The Bridge on the Drina, first published in an English translation in 1959, when I was tracking down a copy of Starling Lawrence's first novel Montenegro. Although these two works employ dramatically different approaches to their subject matter and are over half a century apart in their initial publication dates (Drina was first published in 1945), they both portray life in the Balkans during and after Ottoman rule. So I thought I'd review them as a pair.
Just to set the record straight, The Bridge on the Drina isn't exactly a novel. The story covers three and a half centuries, so there are no continuing characters. It's literally about the bridge, a real bridge that crosses a real river in the town of Visegrad, where Andric spent his childhood. Visegrad is located east of Sarajevo in Bosnia Herzegovina near the borders with Serbia and Montenegro. The bridge was initially completed in 1571, as gift to the town from the celebrated Ottoman Grand Vizier, Mehmed Pasha Sokolli. Born not far from Visegrad, Mehmed Pasha left his homeland when he was conscripted into the Janissary forces in 1516. It was (and still is, centuries later) a beautiful bridge, with eleven graceful arches spanning the river (photos available here). At its construction and for many years thereafter, the center of the bridge featured symmetrical terraces that served as a gathering place for the townspeople. Close to the bridge on one side, the Vizier provided for the construction of a caravanserai that provided shelter for travelers.
Its geographic location, enhanced by the bridge and the caravanserai, caused Visegrad's stature to increase, gradually transforming the town into a veritable crossroads of economic and military activity. Among the stories that Andric tells (or retells) in The Bridge on the Drina are those depicting the Vizier's life, the town before the bridge's construction, the activities associated with the massive building project (including the death of one worker under a stone block and the gruesome execution of another accused of sabotaging the project), and the lives of the people who resided around the bridge in the years following its completion.
While I mentioned that there are no continuing characters in The Bridge on the Drina, I certainly don't mean to suggest that there are no memorable ones! One of my favorites was Alihodja, the last surviving member of the Moslem family entrusted with the care of Mehmed Pasha's properties in Visegrad. Another was Pop Nikola, an Orthodox priest who, like Alihodja, was fulfilling a longstanding family commitment in serving Visegrad's Greek community. Also like Alihodja, Pop Nikola had the courage to speak up against the tyranny of the Austrian military forces that began to occupy Visegrad in 1878. Finally, I remember Lotte, the proprietess of the hotel that replaced the caravanserai. An attractive, hard-working and highly-organized widow of the Jewish faith, Lotte used profits from the hotel to support members of her far-flung family. By the 1910s, the hotel had fallen into disrepair, Lotte's family members had squandered or otherwise misused the money she had so generously shared with them, and she had become old, tired, and embittered.
I greatly appreciated Andric's gently ironic writing style. Although he wrote The Bridge on the Drina in third person from a necessarily rather detached and omniscient perspective, he seldom allowed his own views to overshadow those of his characters, whose lives were considerably more circumscribed than his own. I would compare The Bridge on the Drina favorably to such classic tales of peasant life as John Berger's Into Their Labours trilogy, Ignazio Sllone's Abruzzo Trilogy, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude -- not to mention the pastoral books in Emile Zola's Rougon Maquart cycle. Of course it's important to remember that Andric wrote in Serbo-Croat, so a great deal of credit goes to the translator, Lovett F. Edwards. I also found Edwards' one-page guide to pronunciation of Serbo-Croat names immensely helpful. It cleared up a lot of uncertainties I had been harboring since I began reading about this part of the world.
Toward the later years of the bridge chronicle, as time catches up to his own era, Andric's narrative style changes rather abruptly. At this point, the bridge becomes a setting for a series of fairly tedious reflections about and conversations among a group of young men, some of whom are college students home for the summer, some of whom are workers in the town. They have the usual debates about the means of achieving freedom from their various oppressors and the usual arguments about women. Andric's story of the bridge ends in 1914, with the cataclysmic event of the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at the hand of a Serb nationalist.
Although the locale for Montenegro is larger than a single town, the sense of place pervades this novel as strongly as it does The Bridge on the Drina. Most of the story occurs, as you might easily surmise, in that part of the Balkans known as Montenegro. On my 2004 Michelin map of Europe (a must-have for the books I routinely read!), this shows up as a region, although it has since become a sovereign nation. Montenegro runs from the Adriatic Sea up into the mountainous karst, a geological formation characterized by soft, whitish limestone, lots of caves and small streams, and occasional earthquake activity.
In case you are wondering (I was when I started it) Montenegro is the prequel to The Lightning Keeper. Not realizing this, I read the latter first. If I had it to do over again, I would have started with Montenegro. I felt like I knew a little more about the outcome than I wanted to. This particular segment of the story opens (after a prologue set eighty years later) in 1908, on the eve of a period of great social and political upheaval in the Balkans, due in part to shifting power relations between the Ottoman Turks and the Austro-Hungarians. At this point in time, Toma Pekocevic, who is the principal character in The Lightning Keeper, is still in his adolescence. Lawrence offers considerable foreshadowing in this novel of the adult Toma will become in the next one, strongly suggesting that he was already starting to develop the later novel.
While Toma is a major character in Montenegro, this story belongs to another character. Auberon Harwell is an Englishman who comes to Toma's home on the border of the Ottoman district known as the Sandzak of Novi Pazar to gather information on the political situation and relay it back to his patron, Lord Polgrove. Lawrence remains mute about who Lord Polgrove is, why he wants this information, and what qualifies Harwell to carry out this mission. Had this novel been longer -- it runs just over three hundred pages -- Lawrence might have used that narrative to develop more of Harwell's back story. But that's what I get for preferring long novels . . . I can say that Harwell's mission is supposed to be a secret, so Lord Polgrove provides him with a cover story, that he is researching the native flora. While Harwell is no expert in this, the cover provides Lawrence with some excellent opportunities to write about the hardy little plants that grow in the karst during the spring and summer seasons, when this novel takes place.
The story opens with Harwell's arrival in Cattaro, a port on the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea. We learn in flashbacks of his rather pedestrian life in England (he appears to be a fairly recent college graduate working as a clerk in a law office), of the offer from Lord Polgrove and of Harwell's subsequent sojourn in Paris, where he learns enough Serbo-Croat to be able to converse with the locals. He makes the perilous ascent to Cetinje on horseback and finds himself in another world, one that brought to my mind some of the places that characters from western cultures have encountered in novels I've read about India or Afghanistan. At least he manages to find a hotel and take a long hot bath!
In Cetinje, where he stays only a matter of days, Harwell also socializes a bit with the local expatriate community, including the British Minister Sir Percy Foote, who regularly dines with his Austro-Hungarian colleague, Baron Von Tripp, and the schoolteacher Lydia Wadham, a working class English woman who immediately falls for Harwell in a big way. One of Lydia's star pupils is Natalia Pekocevic, Toma's younger sister. From the school's gardener Drasko, Harwell obtains some background on the Pekocevic family and decides to make contact with the father, Danilo, who is revered as a leader of the nationalist movement in the Sandzak.
Harwell's trip overland to the Sandzak is full of adventure and hardship. I like a good adventure yarn, and Montenegro definitely satisfied that expectation. Nonetheless, I found myself occasionally wondering what motivated Harwell to undertake this journey and what preparation he underwent to enable him to endure the many challenges he encountered. Upon arriving at his destination, Harwell finds Danilo and takes up residence with him and his wife Sofia and Toma, their only surviving son. Here's where the story gets really interesting. Both parents have high expectations for this son, but those expectations are in opposition. Danilo wants Toma to carry on the family tradition of subsistence farming and fighting the oppressors (both Turks and Austro-Hungarians). Sofia has already lost two sons to this dream. She wants Toma to emigrate to America as soon as possible. Harwell falls for Sofia. Toma starts a relationship with Aliye, daughter of the beg (Turkish leader) of the next town over. Lawrence uses the rest of the novel to resolve all these conflicts -- against a backdrop that includes a major earthquake and the start of a war.
I hope I've told you enough about Montenegro to pique your interest. It's well worth reading! I had no trouble at all tracking down a hardcover edition, although it's long out of print. Looks like Harper Perennial reprinted the title in a trade paper edition in 2006. Just remember -- to maximize your enjoyment -- read it before you read The Lightning Keeper!
