Birth of a Bridge
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.
Maylis de Kerangal is the author of several novels in French. Her earlier work, Naissance d’un pont (published in English as Birth of a Bridge), won le prix Médicis and le prix Franz Hessel in 2010. Her novella Tangente vers l’est was the winner of the 2012 Prix Landerneau. In 2014, her fifth novel, Réparer les vivants (published in English as Mend the Living), was published to wide acclaim, winning the Grand Prix RTL-Lire award and the student choice novel of the year from France Culture and Télèrama. de Kerangal lives in Paris, France.
Jessica Moore translated Maylis de Kerangal’s novel Birth of a Bridge and, earlier, Jean-François Beauchemin’s Turkana Boy. She is the author of Everything, Now, part lyric, part memoir, published in 2012 by Brick Books. She is also a songwriter – Beautiful in Red is her debut album.
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