A vivid depiction of the suffering history has imposed upon the people of Bosnia from the late 16th century to the beginning of World War I, The Bridge Over the Drina won Andric the Nobel Prize for Literature
Ivo Andric was born in 1982 in Travnik, Bosnia of Croat parents and grew up alongside Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Roman Catholics in Visegrad, the town on the banks of the Drina in which the book is set. Until 1941 he served a Yugoslav diplomat, then, placed under house arrest in Belgrade by the occupying Germans, Andric turned to writing. In 1961 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. he died in 1975.
In high school, one Saturday, I started reading a book by the
Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andric: The Bridge on the Drina. By the time
I finished it something in me had shifted forever
*New Statesman*
Despite its scale, what makes the book extraordinary is the tender
insight with which it treats these individual lives, whether
Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim or Jewish
*Independent*
Perhaps the most widely translated Yugoslav book since the last war
is Ivo Andric's The Bridge on the Drina... No better example could
have been selected with which to introduce the American public to
contemporary Yugoslav prose
*New York Times*
The best kind of fictionalised history
*Daily Telegraph*
The wealth and variety of its fictional elements carry it so far
beyond the confines of a straightforward novel, it cannot be
limited to such a description. It puts one in mind of a collection
of tales, but no collection of tales (not even A Thousand and One
Nights or Washington Irving's stories) ever possessed such a unity
and continuity of theme
*Le Monde*
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