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A review by daveparry67
Birth of a Bridge by Maylis de Kerangal
3.0
This is a book I bought from the ‘signed books table’ at the Hay Festival in 2018... translated from French by Jessica Moore, it looks in its unique way at the building of a bridge through the lives & history of the people in the city where it’s being built & those gathering to build it, with all the motivations, consequences, triumphs & resentments it trails in its wake. Its long-sentenced, many comma-ed style drew me in from the start as we’re taken on a whirlwind trip around the world & then back through the decades & centuries, meeting the different characters involved, learning about their backgrounds & reasons for being a part of it, & all the local people & vested interests; the ecologists, the boat business owners & operators, ornithologists & academics studying ancient local cultures.
The narrative is fast paced, continuous, detailed, breathless almost at times; the different characters’ stories are overlapping - we ‘travel’ up to a certain point with one person & only after a while of hearing about someone else find out where their paths cross; it’s an appealing way to write (& read). My interest would wane at times & then pick up when someone met another character we’ve not seen with them before, something unexpected happens or there’s a new development; & lots does actually happen; there’s illicit affairs, crazy stunts, sabotage attempts, industrial disputes, tragic accidents, sackings on the spot & weird, shocking events followed by delayed karma... & for a long time we wonder if the bridge will ever even get built!
We see how entrenched the city had become through its evolution over the years... how its character formed... is this about the clash between the old-new & the new-new? Just as the old-new settlers evicted the original inhabitants, who continue to uneasily co-habit with them in the resulting, volatile, city sprawl, the global new-new industrial capitalists are set on making a killing from them all. The bridge starts with the promise of bringing people together, the workers from across the world & the local inhabitants, but in the end it divides them; the birth of this bridge highlights the injustices & abuses of power in the world; some connections are made to leave us with a little bit of satisfaction but I’m not sure if these outweigh the message of separation & division.
If the book is about clashing cultures & jarring juxtapositions then this is mirrored in the language, which at times is so meandering & full of new clauses that I got lost in it & couldn’t really find my way even when I went back & started again! This slowed me down & was frustrating until the translator explained that this was all in the original, she had to find equivalent meanings in English for French phrases that were being used unconventionally & make sure she didn’t lose the jarring or the unusual from the original French text. I’m glad I read this & look forward to finding some more by this author & translator.
The narrative is fast paced, continuous, detailed, breathless almost at times; the different characters’ stories are overlapping - we ‘travel’ up to a certain point with one person & only after a while of hearing about someone else find out where their paths cross; it’s an appealing way to write (& read). My interest would wane at times & then pick up when someone met another character we’ve not seen with them before, something unexpected happens or there’s a new development; & lots does actually happen; there’s illicit affairs, crazy stunts, sabotage attempts, industrial disputes, tragic accidents, sackings on the spot & weird, shocking events followed by delayed karma... & for a long time we wonder if the bridge will ever even get built!
We see how entrenched the city had become through its evolution over the years... how its character formed... is this about the clash between the old-new & the new-new? Just as the old-new settlers evicted the original inhabitants, who continue to uneasily co-habit with them in the resulting, volatile, city sprawl, the global new-new industrial capitalists are set on making a killing from them all. The bridge starts with the promise of bringing people together, the workers from across the world & the local inhabitants, but in the end it divides them; the birth of this bridge highlights the injustices & abuses of power in the world; some connections are made to leave us with a little bit of satisfaction but I’m not sure if these outweigh the message of separation & division.
If the book is about clashing cultures & jarring juxtapositions then this is mirrored in the language, which at times is so meandering & full of new clauses that I got lost in it & couldn’t really find my way even when I went back & started again! This slowed me down & was frustrating until the translator explained that this was all in the original, she had to find equivalent meanings in English for French phrases that were being used unconventionally & make sure she didn’t lose the jarring or the unusual from the original French text. I’m glad I read this & look forward to finding some more by this author & translator.