SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “History as Illness.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (9 February 1997): 2.

In the following review, Eder delineates the major thematic concerns in The Three-Arched Bridge.

If we knew what the future held, we might be less eager than President Clinton to build a bridge to it. Perhaps we would widen the river.

Tragedy to our American mind—to the extent that our mind regards it—is still what you advance out of. Through much of the history of much of the world, it has been what you advance into, helplessly.

The bridge in Ismail Kadare's The Three-Arched Bridge is a foreboding, an omen, a threat. Toward the end of the 1300s, it goes up across a river in Albania, where the last remnants of Byzantine power are giving way to the first sorties of the Ottoman Turks. It is a bridge over which Asia will invade Europe...