Blasts from the Past: The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (2010)

This is the latest in a series of occasional posts featuring books I read years ago about which I was wildly enthusiastic at the time, wanting to press a copy in as many hands as I could.

I read Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge after travelling a little in central and eastern Europe, falling in love with Budapest along the way. The experience of the Second World War there is very different from the one I’m more familiar with in my part of Europe.

Opening in Budapest in 1937, Orringer’s novel tells the story of three young Jewish men, filled with the possibly of a bright future, from the point of view of Andras who wins a scholarship to a prestigious Parisian school of architecture, falling passionately in love with Klara, a Hungarian exile. Tibor is next to leave, studying medicine in Mussolini’s Italy, but Matays’s plans for a glittering dancing career are scuppered when Hungary is drawn into the war. Orringer’s absorbing narative follows Andras from his early youthful triumphs through the appalling conditions suffered in forced labour camps, clinging to the hope of Klara and their children’s survival. An immersive, intensely moving novel, made all the more so given that Orringer drew on her own family’s history in researching it.

What about you, any blasts from the past you’d like to share?

You can find more posts like this here.