The Invisible Bridge

Julie Orringer’s novel The Invisible Bridge is a follow up to her best selling story collection, How to Breathe Underwater. Part love story, part struggle to survive, Andras Levi is a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student living in Paris in the late 1930s. World War II had already started to become the egregious monster that would threaten to consume the whole of Europe. Levi arrives in Paris in 1937 on a scholarship with only a single suitcase carrying a few meager possessions while his other siblings, Tibor, an older brother, and Matyas, a younger brother, wind up in other parts of Europe.

Andras is young and relatively naïve when he meets an enigmatic ballet student, Klara Morgenstern, and falls in love with her. Their love story, along with the fate of Klara’s family, comprises part one of the novel, set against the backdrop of a war-torn landscape. The war is far from Andras’s mind as he immerses himself in his studies, which include a myriad of academic lectures, all-night design projects and the occasional political banter at cafes in the Latin Quarter. It is here that Orringer’s lush prose is most enjoyable. She weaves together both the beauty of Paris and the changes that begin to manifest as the war draws closer. The author also ties in the relationship between Andras and his brothers. They seem close enough for Andras to share how the move to Paris has affected him. “I have a desperate garret,” he writes to his older brother. “It’s everything I hoped for.” With this passage, Orringer conveys Andras’s sentiments for his new home, perhaps alluding to the love he has found with Klara.

Unfortunately, Andras’s feelings are short-lived, as, in September 1939, his student visa is revoked when the war begins to heat up. He is forced to return to Budapest where he is consigned into the Hungarian labor service and compelled to work. Andras must now abandon his pursuit of art and a career as an architect. The sudden weight of hard labor is a shock to the system that proves difficult for Andras to handle. His options have dwindled, and he must consign himself to the brutality of his predicament. He ponders this turn of events. Musing about his lack of choices, he refers to himself as “a speck of human dust, lost on the eastern edge of Europe.”



Orringer uses Andras’s relocation back to Budapest at the start of WWII to transition the novel from its first half to the second. If the first half of the novel is a love story, the second is truly its antithesis. There is a genuinely human quality to Andras in the first part of the novel. He is, in many ways, searching for his place in the world. But in the second half, the author shows how Andras is dehumanized, little by little, until even he cannot recognize the man he has become. Additionally, Andras loses the connection with much of his family as they are scattered all over Europe. In a sense, Orringer uses this personal tragedy as a metaphor for the fragmented nature of the entire world in the wake of the war. Andras is also separated from Klara when he returns to Budapest. It is during this time that a secret from Klara’s past upsets the precarious situation to an even greater extent. As the war intensifies, Orringer conveys to the reader how catastrophic global events have a significant impact on individual lives.

Likely one of the most incredible devices Orringer uses, the “bridge” of the title is a newspaper Andras operates with a fellow coworker at the labor service. The publication is a bit of a spoof; Andras, a former architect student, is tasked with designing the paper. The author uses this device to capture what Andras and his cohort are feeling at the time. It becomes their form of comedic relief and a way to covertly protest their predicament. One writer explains that the newspaper, simplistic and easy to produce, is “undetectable by enemy forces.” But when a Musz discovers the newspaper, he orders Andras and his friend be “stripped of their underwear and made to kneel, manacled, before the camp, and literally eat their words, twenty pages worth.” Through this gruesome act, Orringer conveys the animalistic forms of punishment that were typical of the WWII era. Freedom of speech was nonexistent, and what better way to strip a person of his humanity than to deny him the right to express himself.

At its core, The Invisible Bridge is a story of struggle and survival. The silver lining in this somewhat bleak tale exists on the periphery as minor characters demonstrate acts of kindness that, without the reader’s attention, could go unnoticed. There is also the deep conviction of blind hope Andras is compelled to cling to as he watches society around him continue to degrade, “It had become as natural to him as breathing.” This dichotomy of life and death, struggle, and survival, love and loss is at the heart Orringer’s story, manifesting itself from the beginning when Andras first arrives in Paris, to the end when war, loss, and devastation make of him a completely different man.