From one of the most exciting novelists writing in France today comes Birth of a Bridge – the story of a handful of men and women of various backgrounds and classes, who assemble around the construction of a giant suspension bridge in Coca, a fictional city somewhere in a mythical and fantastic California.
Told on a sweeping scale reminiscent of classic American adventure films, this Médicis Prize–winning novel chronicles the lives of these individuals, who represent a microcosm of not just mythic California, but of humanity as a whole. Their collective effort to complete (or oppose) the mega-project recounts one of the oldest of human dramas, to domesticate – and to radically transform – our world through built form, with all the dramatic tension it brings: a threatened strike, an environmental dispute, sabotage, accidents, career moves, and love affairs … Here generations and social classes cease to exist, and everyone and everything converges toward the bridge as metaphor, a cross-cultural impression of America today.
De Kerangal’s writing has been widely praised for its scope, originality, and use of language. Her rich prose plays with different registers (from the most highly literary to the most colloquial slang) as well as speed and tension through grammatical ellipsis and elision. She employs a huge vocabulary and invents new relationships between words in a completely innovative use of language.
Winner 2010 Médicis Prize
Winner 2010 Franz Hessel Prize
“The whole narrative unfolds in a dreamlike manner, and Moore’s translation is elegant and sensitively attuned to the author’s wordplay and neologisms.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[An] audacious narrative … For all the satiric symbolism and the many cultural references and sideshows, this pragmatic, defiant story is, almost surprisingly, also about building a bridge. … sharp, original, funny and shocking, merciless in its multiple ironies. J.G. Ballard would have applauded it; Don DeLillo would smile wryly. Her prose is snappy, emphatic and muscular, and her use of language, as with names, is free-wheeling. Jessica Moore, the book’s translator, provides a three-page note on the linguistic challenges and unusual word choices. … The story, or rather the project, is the bridge; it is the centre. The humans are minor players. … Although this novel is blunt and plainspeaking, there are moments of beauty … an original, laconic, astute and relentlessly topical morality tale that scores several direct hits.”
—Irish Times
Maylis de Kerangal is the author of several novels in French: Je marche sous un ciel de traîne (2000), La vie voyageuse (2003), Corniche Kennedy (2008), and Naissance d’un pont (translated here as Birth of a Bridge, winner of the Franz Hessel Prize and the Médicis Prize in 2010).
Jessica Moore is an author and literary translator. Mend the Living, her translation of the novel by Maylis de Kerangal, was nominated for the 2016 Man Booker International and won the UK’s Wellcome Prize in 2017.
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