Two Great Reads

In the past year, I discovered and thoroughly enjoyed reading these two novels: The Invisible Bridge and The Flight Portfolio by the author, Julie Orringer.

Orringer is an American novelist born in 1973 in Miami, Florida. She received her BA from Cornell University and her MFA from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received many fellowships, among them, The Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught at several universities including Columbia and Princeton and is currently teaching fiction at New York University and Stanford University in New York.

She has written three books, the first, How to Breathe Under Water, published in 2003, is a collection of nine short stories which won The San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the year.

In 2010 Orringer published The Invisible Bridge, the story of a young Hungarian Jewish student who leaves Budapest in 1937 to study architecture in Paris. There he meets and falls in love with a ballet teacher. They are soon caught up in The Second World War with their families and struggle to survive. They are both faced with many challenges throughout the war. Orringer, the author, grew up in a Hungarian family and her novel reflects on her family’s experiences during the Holocaust. I have read many novels inspired by the war but mostly centred in England, France, Germany and Russia. Reading this novel, I was transported and was living their lives along with them. The Invisible Bridge was named Best Book of 2010 by the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly.

The Flight Portfolio, published in 2019, is based on the true story of Varian Fry, an American journalist and editor who arrived in Marseille in 1940 with a group and formed the Emergency Rescue Committee to help Jewish artists and writers escape the Nazis and the Gestapo and immigrate to the United States. Amid the chaos of the war, they endured unbelievable and innumerable difficulties. The novel received The Association of Jewish Libraries award in 2020 and was named a finalist for the American Library in Paris Book Award in 2019. You may also wish to view Transatlantic on Netflix inspired by the novel. Though the series is very good, in my opinion, it is no match for the novel.

If you have read these two novels, I would love to read your comments.