Name: The Three-arched Bridge
ISBN: 9781559707923

Ismail Kadare

A bridge under construction in 14th Century Albania is secretly sabotaged by ferry men who are afraid of being made redundant. Officially they blame a prophecy that no bridge will stand over the river without human sacrifice to the water spirits. So the builders immure a villager and the bridge gets built. A Balkan parable by the author of The Pyramid.

The Three-arched Bridge

Dana Kraft

I preferred "The Siege" to this book, but it was still interesting and thought-provoking. Its a short, simple story. I like how he brings up the crazy local beliefs and legends during the bridge's construction. Of course they only sound crazy today, but it makes me wonder which of our beliefs and conventional wisdom will seem absurd in a few hundred years. In general, this book made me think about how we are so easily distracted from the real, enduring events that are happenig right in front of us. The two passages that I will remember are:

"I thought that, like all the affairs of this world, this story was both simpler and more involved than it appeared....They had come from far away. One side came from the water, and the other from the steppe, to accomplish before our eyes something that, as their collector of customs said, could still not be understood for what it was: a bridge or a crime. For it was still unknown which of the two would survive longer on this earth and which would be eroded by the seasons. Only then would we understand which was the real edifice and which the mere scaffolding that helped in ots construction, the pretext that justified it."

"That new world you told me about the other day, that new order with its banks and percentages, which is going to carry the world a thousand years forward, it is founded on blood too."  "Like all sorts of order, monk"