The Invisible Bridge
By Julie Orringer
Published by Vintage and distributed by Random House (2010)
Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle
Rating: Four
Stars (out of five)
Lately, I seem to be reading a lot of books set during World
War II. This is one of the better ones,
and I enjoyed it a lot. Orringer doesn’t
shy away from allowing her characters to experience horror—if she did, the
story wouldn’t work, as her characters are European Jews—but the novel is generally
uplifting without being preachy.
The Invisible Bridge tells
the story of Andras, a young, Jewish architectural student who moves from
Budapest to Paris in the late 1930s.
There, he meets and falls in love with Klara, a fellow Hungarian Jew
with a mysterious and tragic past. Once
Andras learns that Klara returns his affections, the novel chronicles the
couple’s struggle to maintain their family as Nazi Germany seizes control of
Europe.
Other readers have criticized this novel for its
sentimentality, and I agree to an extent.
The closing chapters, in particular, are almost saccharine. But at its heart The Invisible Bridge is a love story, so of course it centers on
feelings, and there’s plenty of heartbreak and plenty of realistic obstacles
for the characters to overcome. The
characters who survive to the end do so in spite of incredible odds, and I was
swept up in and moved by this lovely novel.
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