?If you're still looking for a ?big? novel to carry into the summer holidays ? one in which you can lose yourself without the guilty suspicion that you're slumming ? then Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge is the book you want,? Tim Rutten wrote in the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday.
Orringer published a collection of short stories seven years ago, but The Invisible Bridge is her first novel. It ?is in every admirable sense an ?ambitious? historical novel, in which large human emotions ? profound love, familial bonds and the deepest of human loyalties ? play out against the backdrop of unimaginable cruelty that was the Holocaust,? Rutten wrote.
The novel was inspired in part by the writer?s grandparents.
"Around 10 years ago, when I was planning a trip to Paris for the first time, my grandfather mentioned that he'd lived in Paris for two years when he was a young man," she explained. "That was the first I'd heard of it. He told me he had a scholarship to architecture school ? as a Hungarian Jew, he'd been shut out of admission to Hungarian schools?. He studied in Paris for a couple of years before the war began, and then he lost his student visa, had to return to Hungary, and was conscripted into a forced labor company?. As I started to ask questions about that time, a series of amazing and devastating stories emerged, and a novel began to take shape in my mind ? the story of a young Hungarian Jewish man who'd envisioned one kind of life but who was forced by the turnings of history to live quite another," Orringer told an interviewer, Rutten wrote.
?It is a life powerfully, unsentimentally and inspiringly evoked in this gracefully written and altogether remarkable first novel,? Rutten wrote.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI) / Los Angeles Times
