The Invisible Bridge in Around the World

Apr 29, 2010 Daisy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: dance, hungary, france, italy, favorites-of-all-time

While I was reading this, I never once thought ahead to what I'd read next, so engrossing was this novel. It's so readable and enlightening and luxurious and terrifying. Now that I'm finished, I feel kind of lost. (What do I read now? What should follow this?)

At first I thought this was almost too good because it was so pleasurable. But then in the second half of the book (the first takes place in Paris, the second in Hungary), you think back to the characters you met at the beginning, who and w While I was reading this, I never once thought ahead to what I'd read next, so engrossing was this novel. It's so readable and enlightening and luxurious and terrifying. Now that I'm finished, I feel kind of lost. (What do I read now? What should follow this?)

At first I thought this was almost too good because it was so pleasurable. But then in the second half of the book (the first takes place in Paris, the second in Hungary), you think back to the characters you met at the beginning, who and where they were, and you are broken by what they've become and what's happened to them. For instance, the character József: compare how you meet him with what he becomes, and he's a secondary character. And more than any book I've read lately, you are very present with the characters. Corny maybe to say this but you live with them and fear with them and wonder and well, everything.

Outside, three pygmy goats stepped out of the gorse and ate all the clipped flowers and a good many half-grown lettuces and an empty cardboard matchbook and Klara's forgotten handkerchief. p. 188

I wouldn't trade your complication for anyone else's simplicity. p. 225 (Andras to Klara)

as of p. 231: There's a real feeling here of people on the verge of war and how it must have felt to not know what was going to happen. You don't get that sense very clearly, very often, because we can only read such stories from our position of knowledge and hindsight.

as of p. 434: It's slow-paced in a satisfying way, letting you get deep into the times, characters, details enough that you, well, feel like you're there with them, in their present. It's comprehensive and thorough.

The fact that he'd had a happy childhood in Konyár, had gone to school, learned to draw, gone to Paris, fallen in love, studied, worked, had a son--none of it was predictive of what might happen in the future; it was largely a matter of luck. None of it was a reward, no more than the Munkaszolgálat was a punishment; none of it entitled him to future happiness or comfort. Men and women suffered all over the world. p. 484

Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust? p. 489

Strange, Andras thought, that war could lead you involuntarily to forgive a person who didn't deserve forgiveness, just as it might make you kill a man you didn't hate. p. 516 ...more

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Jul 12, 2010 Maude rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, world-war-ii, german-occupation, jewish-intolerance

"Paris, 1937. Andras Levi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver. As he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter's recipient, he becomes privy to a secret history that will alter the course of his own life. Meanshile, as his elder brother takes up medical studies in Modena and their younger brother leaves school for the stage, Europe's unfolding tragedy sends each of th ...more

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Jul 16, 2010 Wendy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013, audio-book, wwii, fiction, judaism

I want to give this 4-1/2 stars. This was a very compelling story about a young Hungarian Jew and his quest for survival during WWII. I didn't know much about the details of how Jews were treated in Hungary -- the fact that Hungary collaborated w/ Germany, but wasn't actually occupied by Germany until very late in the war. They still endured terrible depravation, but it sounds like more Jews were able to survive in Hungary as compared to the Jewish population of Poland. That being said, there wa ...more

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May 15, 2010 Lynne rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, historical-fiction

I almost gave up on this book 1/3 of the way through it. It seemed like more romance than historical fiction. I stuck with it and I am glad I did although it was overly long. Eventually I figured out that the slow, slow switch from the everday to the horrific was the point. I'm slow on the uptake sometimes! ...more

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