The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail KadareAllen Hibbard
Ismail Kadare. The Three-Arched Bridge. Trans. John Hodgson. Arcade, 1997. 184 pp. $21.95.
The narrator of The Three-Arched Bridge, a monk by the name of Gjon, begins his story by writing that he will attempt to tell the “whole truth” and in so doing “record the lie we saw and the truth we did not see.” He proceeds to say, “I write this in haste, because times are troubled, and the future looks blacker than ever before.” That threatening dark force is the Ottoman Empire, poised to use Arberia (Albania) as a bridge for their advance into Europe. This tale by Albanian writer Ismail Kadare (titles already available in English include The Concert, The General of the Dead Army, The Pyramid, and The Palace of Dreams) is set in a small village alongside a river bearing the name Ujana e Keqe (“Wicked Waters”) in the year 1377. Up until this time, a ferry has served to transport people and goods across the river. All this changes when strangers speaking a difficult tongue make the local count an irresistible offer in exchange for permission to build a bridge across the river. The local population may privately hold suspicions regarding their motives, but no one speaks out except for an old woman named Ajkuna who continually decries the bridge as the work of the devil. Attempts to sabotage the bridge are subverted by the builders who developd and circulate a myth that the bridge requires a human sacrifice. The monk himself worries that local legends he has shared with a stranger posing as a folklorist have been twisted and perverted for enemy purposes. It is little surprise to the reader when one day a common fellow by the name of Murrash Zenebisha is found immured in the bridge. The monk suspects foul play. This is part of the truth he is trying to uncover. Meantime, the monk and his fellow townsfolk unwittingly, naively watch on as the Ottoman Turks put in place all the machinery for invasion and occupation. Kadare’s work has been compared to writers as dissimilar as Kafka and García Márquez. In style and tone, as well as theme, this novel reminds me of Julien Gracq’s remarkable The Opposing Shore, another powerful parable of the ominous and mysterious operations of opposing systems. [Allen Hibbard]