• The Invisible Bridge

  • By: Julie Orringer
  • Narrated by: Arthur Morey
  • Length: 27 hrs and 49 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (987 ratings)

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The Invisible Bridge  By  cover art

The Invisible Bridge

By: Julie Orringer
Narrated by: Arthur Morey
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Publisher's summary

Julie Orringer’s astonishing first novel, eagerly awaited since the publication of her heralded best-selling short-story collection, How to Breathe Underwater (“fiercely beautiful” - The New York Times; “unbelievably good” - Monica Ali), is a grand love story set against the backdrop of Budapest and Paris, an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are ravaged by war, and the chronicle of one family’s struggle against the forces that threaten to annihilate it.

Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. As he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter’s recipient, he becomes privy to a secret history that will alter the course of his own life. Meanwhile, as his elder brother takes up medical studies in Modena and their younger brother leaves school for the stage, Europe’s unfolding tragedy sends each of their lives into terrifying uncertainty. At the end of Andras’s second summer in Paris, all of Europe erupts in a cataclysm of war.

From the small Hungarian town of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the lonely chill of Andras’s room on the rue des Écoles to the deep and enduring connection he discovers on the rue de Sévigné, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labor camps and beyond, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a love tested by disaster, of brothers whose bonds cannot be broken, of a family shattered and remade in history’s darkest hour, and of the dangerous power of art in a time of war.

Expertly crafted, magnificently written, emotionally haunting, and impossible to put down, The Invisible Bridge resoundingly confirms Julie Orringer’s place as one of today’s most vital and commanding young literary talents.

©2010 Julie Orringer (P)2010 Random House

Critic reviews

"One of the best books of the year."—Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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. . . . Stunning. . . . 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. . . . Orringer traverses this perilous rhetorical terrain with remarkable—and, more important, convincing, self-possession. . . . Remarkably affecting. . . . A life powerfully, unsentimentally and inspiringly evoked in this gracefully written and altogether remarkable first novel.”—Tim Rutten, The Los Angeles Times

The Invisible Bridge deserves to be praised. It takes the introspective themes we’ve loved so well in American literature—from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself to A. M. Homes’s Music for Torching—and points them in a different direction. . . . Rendered in sweeping, epic fashion . . . a close look at the terrible ways that enormous historical events can affect individual lives. . . . The strength of The Invisible Bridge lies in Orringer’s ability to make us care so deeply about the people of her all-too-real fictional world.”—Andrew Ervin, The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)

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What listeners say about The Invisible Bridge

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Stumbling Narration

I have struggled with this book for hours upon hours of listening. The narration is so slow, fumbling and awkward that it has simply ruined the book for me. I don't speak German or Hungarian so I can't comment on those languages in the reading--other reviewers have found them equally terrible. However, I do speak French and the mispronunciations are painful. Even street and place names are a total jumble. I find myself trying to sort out the places and words and in doing so lose track of the plot. I agree with other reviewers that greater care should have been taken in finding a multilingual narrator.

I can only recommend the book to someone who does not speak French, German or Hungarian. That way the listener won't be aware of the glaring language issues in the narration. Very disappointing.

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44 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

The Critics Got in Right

I'm usually sceptical when a book gets rave reviews from the professional critics, but this time they got it right. The Invisible Bridge is a phenomenal novel, quite old-fashioned, and devoid of literary gimmicks and clandestine intentions of the author to preach or moralize. In short, it is beautifully written in a classic prose style, through which Julie Orringer creates an atmosphere of both passion and gloom in an historical setting that, while generally well-known, focuses first on sinister pre-World War II Paris, and then moves to lesser known Hungary after WWII begins. Orringer creates characters with multiple frailties, like most people I know, but whose virtues are enough that ultimately I cared deeply about their fates. The short epilogue was as moving as anything I can remember reading. Call The Invisible Bridge a saga, an epic, a profoundly moving love story; take your pick.

For a long time, I hesitated to buy this book and changed my mind about the purchase several times after adding it to my wish list. At 28 hours, it is by far the longest audio book I've ever listened to and I didn't want to make a mistake. I was finally persuaded to give it a try by the high quality of the reader reviews on amazon.com from those who were captivated by the book. After a somewhat slow start, Orringer's beautiful prose, attention to detail, atmosphere of hope amid impending doom, brought me into the narrative in such depth that I listened to it for long hours at a time. This is a serious literary novel for a serious reader. Many books that I read tell good and interesting stories, but seldom rise to the ranks of literature. For me, The Invisible Bridge combines the best of both worlds: a captivating, fluid narrative, with a fine piece of writing.

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41 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • DH
  • 09-23-10

Now I understand

My mother lived through the German occupation as a little girl in Hungary. She has many quirks, fears and nerausies that never made any sense to me until I read this book. It was as though I was experiencing the endless suffering with the books characters followed by brief periods of hope for better times followed by more suffering and the continuing deteriation of the human condition year and year after year. Yet, I couldn't stop listening and continued to keep the hope alive myself as this author seemed to capture the essence of what it must have been like to live through such a horrible period in history. I must thank the author for helping me to understand this piece of my families history while apologize to my mother for never really understanding what she went through. Sorry mom!

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21 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Marvelous story, horrible narration

It is a testament to Julie Orringer's writing skill that I could endure the what seemed like 100 hours of yammering. The narrator was one of the worst I've heard. He droned on in a portentious voice and seemed to have no ability to provide different personas for the individual characters. His pronunciation of French words, even to my tin ear, was painful. I think this is a book better read than heard.

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21 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent story - improvable on narration

This book ranks amongst the best I have read or listened to so far. Unfortunately it is almost spoiled by the incapability of the narrator to correctly pronounce as much as one single hungarian or french name or phrase and the author uses quiet a few of them. This does bother me as I am capable of both languages but might not affect listeners who don`t speak the languages. However, the book itself - the story, the characters ... amazing read.

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18 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Great book, awful narration

It is a testament to the strength of this book that I listened to all four downloads. The story is riveting, I learned a lot about Hungary before and during WWII and even though it's "another Holocaust" book, it's really, really good. However, the narration is awful. Mr. Morey's voice is a snooze fest. Worse yet, he mispronounces his Hebrew and German words and mangles some French ones...I don't know Hungarian so I can't comment there. It is a major pet peeve of mine when narrators don't take the time to ask someone who knows the language, how to pronounce the words - and Morey does this over and over again. This would have been a 10-star review with a different narrator.

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18 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Good book ruined by a bad reader

How could the performance have been better?

A good book was ruined by the incredibly bad mis-pronunciation of French words by the reader. He obviously had NOT done his homework, and it was most distracting.

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15 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Great story of a family

I loved this book. I learned so much about Hungary. The country was ravaged by war and leaders. The stories of the Jewish traumas are so personal and poignant. Beautiful writing!

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12 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Flawed but promising effort. Not a good narration

Julie Orringer clearly has a love of words and a masterly hand for painting word pictures. It's also apparent that she's done a great deal of research into a lesser-known aspect of Holocaust history; i.e., what happened to Hungarian Jews. This aspect of the book is different and should have a particular appeal for anyone who has an interest in the social history of Europe during WW2.

I appreciated this story, but I wasn't fully drawn in. The main characters, Andras and Klara, seemed two-dimensional. In this lengthy novel, there was too much dwelling on their morose love affair for my taste. For no good reason, Andras often imagines that Klara has been unfaithful to him. His emotional immaturity makes Klara's love for him a little hard to believe in completely.

Several side characters tended to be more interesting. Andras's brother Tibor and his best friends, Mendel and Eli definitely fall into that category. I wish more of the book could have focused on them.

A truly successful novel should have some element of humor in it. Even in Holocaust literature, I've read many books that had that element. It's often bitter, dark humor, but humor nonetheless, that made those books rise above the rest of the genre. This book's plot plods on in its dour way from one event to the next, with only one exception. Andras and his friend Mendel collaborate to create three underground newspapers when they are on their various labor service assignments. The excerpts from these papers are satirical and clever, and bring the book to life in those pages.

Despite these criticisms, Julie Orringer's talent is obvious. She has a real work ethic, a love of language and I hope next time around she will present more vivid, compelling characters and tighter pacing. I will give her next novel a try.

I cannot recommend the audiobook, narrated by Arthur Morey. Morey's voice tends toward the monotone and his emphases and emotional content often seemed to me not to be what the auth

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent read

I wouldn't be put off by the scoffs at the narrator and not read this book. Mr. Morey has a pretty poor French accent, but otherwise he reads well
and the book should nor be missed. Excellent story and wonderful characters.

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9 people found this helpful