The Three-Arched Bridge
Ismail Kadare. Tr. by John Hodgson
(Arcade Books)

As with many writers in obscure languages, the works of the Albanian Ismail Kadare come to us like the light from a distant star—at a great delay, and in response to events that we can only tentatively decipher. While it's tempting to read his latest novel, a reworking of an ancient folk tale set in 1377, as a reflection on the recent eruptions in the Balkans, the book is in fact some 20 years old, and is part of an on-going examination of his country's often bloody immersion in its legends and myths.

What's interesting is that Kadare, in the voice of the monk who narrates the events, illuminates how these public legends are manipulated for personal gain. Superstition begins in the attempt to read a meaning behind an incomprehensible reality, but Kadare reads behind the legends to find a very material set of circumstances motivating them.

An epileptic stranger has a fit by the banks of a river; another stranger interprets this as a sign that a bridge must be built. Yet both strangers, the monk intuits, are planted by the giant financial concern that will profit from the bridge tolls. When the bridge suffers repeated nocturnal damage, the locals recall an ancient legend that all large constructions demand a human sacrifice. But perhaps it's merely someone in the pay of the ferryboat owner, seeking in turn to protect his own profits. When a villager appears dead one morning, walled into the first arch of the bridge, the locals assume that he's the requisite sacrifice; the monk guesses that he's the saboteur, and that his plastered-over, gargoyle-like corpse is a warning to others. Meanwhile, the bridge is not merely a profit-making enterprise, but the first out-raveling of the tentacles of the Ottoman Empire, which will eventually advance across it to occupy Albania.

"All great building works resemble crimes, and vice versa," claims a character, and this duality appears even in the book's language, which animates the inanimate—foreign languages are "a thicket of brambles"; the repaired bridge "resembled rags tied around a broken limb"; the river "surged forward like the vanguard of an army"—but always in an ominous way. Superstitions and legends are for Kadare the enriching soil of a national literature, but also the clay that can be molded by the powerful for their own ends. Despite the delay in this book's appearance in English, it offers a quite current commentary on a region still dominated by demagogues.

© Edward Batchelder
(from The Boston Phoenix)