Ivo Andric: Bridge Between East and West

by Celia Hawkesworth

This is the first intoduction in English to the Nobel prize-winning novelist and writer Ivo Andric. The book covers the full range of his work, including verse, essays and reflective prose as well as fiction. Celia Hawkesworth also provides an account of Andric's life, and the cultural history of his native Bosnia.>

The story of the vizier's elephant --
The bridge on the Žepa --
In the guest-house --
Death in Sinan's tekke --
The climbers --
A letter from 1920 --
The house on its own : introduction --
Alipasha --
A story --
The damned yard

Genres: Classics, Literature

272 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1985

About the author

Celia Hawkesworth has translated nearly forty books from the Serbo-Croatian, including Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić; The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić; Belladonna by Daša Drndić, which was short-listed for the Oxford Weidenfeld prize in 2018; and Adios, Cowboy by Olja Savičević. She lives in London.

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

While he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, the Bosnian author Ivo Andric remains little known in the English-speaking world except for his magnum opus The Bridge on the Drina. Celia Hawkesworth, a scholar of Serbo-Croatian language and literature, published this book in 1985 to give a broader view of Andric's life and work.

Hardcore fans of Andric on the basis of his few works available in English may enjoy seeing what they are missing among his still untranslated works (though much has been translated since '85). However, I found this book very dry: essentially the author summarizes one story after after. The biographical information we get about Andric is merely a small sketch before the bulk of the book is dedicated to plot summaries. Another downside of this book is that it was written before the collapse of Yugoslavia. No discussion of Bosnian history, such as the centuries that Andric mined for settings or his own life too, now seems complete without a discussion of how that all fit into the sectarian carnage that ripped through Bosnia in the 1990s.

[Anekdotisch Probleem · Rating 4 out of 5]

7,2/10

[Ramo · Rating 5 out of 5]

good book