Bridges
Spanning continents and centuries, Bridges braids history and fiction to reveal how bridges are both feats of engineering and vessels of memory. From the Roman Pont du Gard to the Millau Viaduct, from the Drina to the Bloor Street Viaduct and Maputo–Katembe, the book follows workers, engineers, nuns, poets, truckers, and migrants whose lives converge on steel, stone, rope, and water. Lyrical and deeply researched, it explores connection and rupture as well as power, faith, grief, love, and labour and shows how motion is emotion and how every crossing changes us. A luminous meditation on the architectures that carry us between past and future.
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Bridges
Spanning continents and centuries, Bridges braids history and fiction to reveal how bridges are both feats of engineering and vessels of memory. From the Roman Pont du Gard to the Millau Viaduct, from the Drina to the Bloor Street Viaduct and Maputo–Katembe, the book follows workers, engineers, nuns, poets, truckers, and migrants whose lives converge on steel, stone, rope, and water. Lyrical and deeply researched, it explores connection and rupture as well as power, faith, grief, love, and labour and shows how motion is emotion and how every crossing changes us. A luminous meditation on the architectures that carry us between past and future.
Cover artwork by Diane Swartzberg
Barbara Adair is a much-lauded writer based in Johannesburg. In Tangier we Killed the Blue Parrot was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Award in 2004. Her novel End was shortlisted for Africa Regional Commonwealth Prize. WILL, the Passenger Delaying Flight … received wide acclaim, and In the Shadow of the Springs I Saw, was nominated for the NIHSS prize. She contributed to Queer Africa and Queer Africa 2, and her writing, particularly her travel writing, has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies. She has a PhD. in Creative Writing from the University of Pretoria.
In Bridges, Barbara Adair crosses 2,000 years and four continents to tell stories of people who engineered bridges and those who cross them. She flows between fact and fiction with stories of a Roman aqueduct and the slave who learned to love it, a viaduct that became a suicide magnet, a bridge across Maputo Bay that spans dreams. These poetic stories show how humans work to connect with each other. Griffin Shea – Bridge Books
Barbara Adair is surely South Africa’s most eccentric novelist. Hers is a global vision which is rooted in cosmopolitan love. Her novel, Bridges, is a unique engagement with passion – physical, homosexual, conceptual. Bridge builders desire. Love is a tough ideal. From script to matter, vision to function, Adair’s novel crosses vast realms that span Mozambique and America, France to China. It is the universality of crossed worlds that matter. Engineers are profound magicians. Romance and heartbreak and sex, every calculated expediency, survives in every strut and pile. Bridges connect, but they are also the architectonics of threat, death, lust. Richly detailed, quirkily personal, factual and fictional, this is a novel that towers epically above others. No longer are we mired in mawkish solitary realms, hitched to banal suspense, coaxed towards closure. Rather, we are thrust apart, about, beyond all preconceived horizons. For this is a magnificently built world that not only spans the earth’s depths but scales human dream. God is everywhere – suspiciously so. As for mortal love? It is the core of this beautiful and rare book. Ashraf Jamal
Bridges is a compelling work that speaks to the human desire to connect places, people and histories. Representing bridges as both engineered structures and metaphors, Adair improvises narratives that speak across time and space of connection, loss and possibility. Michael Titlestad
