Culture|Book review
Nationalities, goals, and ideals mingle on the huge bridge site of imaginary California.
Novel
Maylis de Kerangal: Birth of the bridge (Naissance d’un Pont). Ville Keynäs and Anu Partanen, Finland. Siltala. 297 s.
First I read French Maylis de Kerangalin (b. 1967) The novel began to fill me with unbelievable joy from the first pages: I’ve never read anything like this before!
On the last pages, the feeling had already leveled off, but the originality of the narrative still fascinated and influenced.
It has also been praised in de Kerangal’s earlier novels, in addition to special topics and, at least in Finland, a skilful translation.
The meandering, rich sentences often seem to accelerate as they progress. In addition to the mass of text, the intensity increases, and maintaining it, keeping it together, requires a lot from translators.
All de Kerangalin translated three Finnish novels Ville Keynäs and Anu Partanen have previously become acquainted with the world of heart transplants and decorative painting.
Now it’s time for the terms, practices, and hierarchies of the huge bridge site.
It doesn’t get boring for a humanist either, so the Bridge Builders are interesting people. And it’s not just a bridge, it’s something much, much bigger.
The city of Coca, which has dropped out of development, is said to be located in California, on two sides of a large river, and is now being connected by a bridge that could accommodate a six-lane highway.
When traction is received from the Emir of Dubai, a huge construction site is trampled into by workers. At the heart of the story, de Kerangal sets a mixed crowd out of them.
She is a veteran engineer, a female concrete expert, an earthmoving machine driver piloting her unfortunate family alone and an anthropologist opposing the bridge, as well as several young people drifting in their lives.
The crowd, with its many backgrounds and motives, gives de Kerangal root in stories that are somewhat reminiscent of Canadian Emma Hooperin novel Homesick songs (2018). In it, fishermen in the depleting ocean are trying to survive as workers on a continental oil field.
Even at the Coca bridge construction site, people from all over the world have mostly been thrown, and only a few are there of their own free will. It is like a scale model of the modern world driven by a global capitalist mechanism.
Even wilder allegorian de Kerangal build. The novel can also be read as a completely abstract structure of thought about human choices and possibilities.
After all, the entire bridge is located in an imaginary milieu and time. All that matters is that it transcends something that has a present on one side and a future on the other, after the bridge is completed.
In this way, the new and the old are juxtaposed, and “development” is not only positive. It turns out, for example, that the bridge will destroy the natural people that live upstream of the river.
The author deals with how multidimensional change is by playing with the names of his personalities grabbed by philosophers.
The bridge engineer is named the messenger of enlightenment Denis Diderot’n according, but she falls in love with a woman whose name is reminiscent of ecology and disobedience in anticipation Henry David Thoreaun.
The bridge also plays its part in the resistance, including the violent one, but even there the front lines are not clear – as is really the case in today’s world. Elsewhere in the novel, “development” is constantly opposed, both for ecological reasons and in defense of the existing exploitative economy.
The birth of the bridge the decision goes on with the same logic – perhaps too fantastic though.
But it would be great to be able to step out of an “evolution” that will only destroy the planet. And perhaps enlightenment and nature can still, in spite of everything, lend a hand to each other.
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