Birth of a Bridge
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
Coca, Southern California. A small town on a wild river, at the margins of the red-rocked desert and the forest where the last of the state's Native Americans still make their home.
When Boa, the charismatic new mayor, decides to put Coca on the map, he plans a monumental new project: a six-lane bridge, two hundred metres high, designed and destined to catapult the city into the third millennium.
Workers from across the globe flock to California: to earn a living, to escape their pasts, to bear witness to man's mastery of nature. But the project's majestic scope has no regard for the legacy of this ancient land, and within this monochrome Babel festers a very human cocktail of fears and passions.
At once timeless and yet exquisitely of its moment, Maylis De Kerangal's multi-award-winning novel follows its broad cast of construction workers and architects, diggers and dreamers, as they navigate both the intricacies of their project and the depths of the human heart.
Translated from the French by Jessica Moore
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French novelist de Kerangal creates a modern saga chronicling the construction of a colossal bridge. The original edition won both the 2010 Prix M dicis and the 2010 Prix Franz Hessel. Beginning with an international consortium winning the tender and hundreds of people project managers, engineers, crane operators, truck drivers converging on a small town in California, the novel weaves their individual stories into one grand narrative. While the bridge undoubtedly will bring prosperity to the town, the native groups and the as-yet unspoiled land on the far side of the river will be forever compromised. Opposition groups form, progress is threatened. And progress itself is an ambiguous element in the novel, often taking the form of political corruption. But there is also lyricism and beauty to be found through each character's obsessive outlook on the land and the bridge. Moore (winner of the PEN America Translation Award) stays true to de Kerangal's unique prose, which flows from the mythic to the mundane. Her translation is clear and unadorned. The story told through its varied cast of characters, alternating from the grandiose to the intimate, is one that will stay with readers long after the book is closed and the bridge is built.
