Hi Everyone! Just reading over some of the wonderful comments and questions. Thank you! I'm going to respond here to a comment/question left by Kathleen and I will re-post what she originally wrote so my reply makes sense:
KATHLEEN: “As one of the authors of "Reading Between The Wine...the story of a traveling book club" and a book club member for 10 years I am always looking for the perfect book to add to our list. 'The Invisible Bridge' proved to be one of the best stories of 2010. The harshness of landscape balanced with the softness of souls brought us to tears and wonder more than once.
We must take the time to ask ourselves where does courage develop? Is it in our DNA or a refection of our surroundings or both? All the questions of humanity are forced to the surface and made us wonder if we could display such sense of devotion.”
MY RESPONSE: I thought a lot about the origins of courage as I wrote this book. At the outset, the kind of courage that's required of Andras is the kind many of us face when we're entering a new phase of our lives: how will we meet the unknown factors (in Andras's case, of language, education, and location) that we'll face in the days ahead? How will we recognize ourselves, or change, or build new selves, when our environment changes? How will we bear the separation from our families? But as the novel develops, and the political situation worsens, Andras has to develop different kinds of courage still. First there's the kind that allows him to keep going to a school that he knows is peopled in part by antisemites; then there's the kind that lets him pursue a relationship with an older woman, one whose past is partly unknown to him. Later there's the kind of courage that comes from finding himself in circumstances beyond his control. That's the more challenging kind, the kind more difficult for us to imagine from our relatively protected point of view. There are moments when Andras loses his humanity; it's through his connections to the people he loves that he finds his way back to it.
KATHLEEN: “As one of the authors of "Reading Between The Wine...the story of a traveling book club" and a book club member for 10 years I am always looking for the perfect book to add to our list. 'The Invisible Bridge' proved to be one of the best stories of 2010. The harshness of landscape balanced with the softness of souls brought us to tears and wonder more than once.
We must take the time to ask ourselves where does courage develop? Is it in our DNA or a refection of our surroundings or both? All the questions of humanity are forced to the surface and made us wonder if we could display such sense of devotion.”
MY RESPONSE:
I thought a lot about the origins of courage as I wrote this book. At the outset, the kind of courage that's required of Andras is the kind many of us face when we're entering a new phase of our lives: how will we meet the unknown factors (in Andras's case, of language, education, and location) that we'll face in the days ahead? How will we recognize ourselves, or change, or build new selves, when our environment changes? How will we bear the separation from our families? But as the novel develops, and the political situation worsens, Andras has to develop different kinds of courage still. First there's the kind that allows him to keep going to a school that he knows is peopled in part by antisemites; then there's the kind that lets him pursue a relationship with an older woman, one whose past is partly unknown to him. Later there's the kind of courage that comes from finding himself in circumstances beyond his control. That's the more challenging kind, the kind more difficult for us to imagine from our relatively protected point of view. There are moments when Andras loses his humanity; it's through his connections to the people he loves that he finds his way back to it.