Andras must now abandon his pursuit of art and a career as an architect. He is forced to return to Budapest where he is consigned into the Hungarian labor service and compelled to work. Unfortunately, Andras’s feelings are short-lived, as, in September 1939, his student visa is revoked when the war begins to heat up. “It’s everything I hoped for.” With this passage, Orringer conveys Andras’s sentiments for his new home, perhaps alluding to the love he has found with Klara. “I have a desperate garret,” he writes to his older brother. They seem close enough for Andras to share how the move to Paris has affected him. The author also ties in the relationship between Andras and his brothers. She weaves together both the beauty of Paris and the changes that begin to manifest as the war draws closer. It is here that Orringer’s lush prose is most enjoyable. The war is far from Andras’s mind as he immerses himself in his studies, which include a myriad of academic lectures, all-night design projects and the occasional political banter at cafes in the Latin Quarter. Their love story, along with the fate of Klara’s family, comprises part one of the novel, set against the backdrop of a war-torn landscape. Andras is young and relatively naïve when he meets an enigmatic ballet student, Klara Morgenstern, and falls in love with her. Levi arrives in Paris in 1937 on a scholarship with only a single suitcase carrying a few meager possessions while his other siblings, Tibor, an older brother, and Matyas, a younger brother, wind up in other parts of Europe. World War II had already started to become the egregious monster that would threaten to consume the whole of Europe.
Part love story, part struggle to survive, Andras Levi is a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student living in Paris in the late 1930s. Julie Orringer’s novel The Invisible Bridge is a follow up to her best selling story collection, How to Breathe Underwater.
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