“The essence of Mr. Wilder’s book is really the feeling in it; it is a ‘notation of the heart’ with sympathy. Gaily or sadly, but always with understanding, a belief in the miracle of love runs through it all.” –Times Literary Supplement (London)“On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” With this … travelers into the gulf below.” With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, one of the towering achievements in American fiction, and a novel beloved throughout the world.
By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death—and to Wilder’s timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.
This edition includes a foreword by acclaimed author Russell Banks and features previously unpublished notes and other illuminating documentary material about the novel and author.
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Question of the Week wanted good, short reads…
This is a beautifully-written story. It begins with the collapse of the eponymous bridge (an Incan relic); five individuals fell to their death as a result and a local priest who witnessed the event subsequently investigates the lives of these five individuals in an attempt to make sense of the tragedy. The life stories of these five people are described in artful and artistic prose; many a line or description begs to be read aloud, some simply for their musicality and lyric qualities and some for the magnitude of the seemingly-simple truths they espouse.
A few of my favorite examples:
– “Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.”
– “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”
– “Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.”
There are many overused sayings that could be used, in connection to this story-“There are no guarantees in this life”, “The good die young”, “You never know what the next day will bring”, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die”. This classic story is a tragedy, in so many ways. The characters touch our souls, and we dread reading the end, to find out who lives and who dies.
Max Boot’s book was fine, but The Bridge of San Luis Rey was a lovely palate cleanser after a dense tome on warfare—not simply for its slender page count, but for the spare, breathy urgency of its prose. Wilder wields a fleet style that I admire in no small part because I just can’t do it. His writing isn’t colloquial, but it gains its literary sheen without becoming comma-clotted and dense. It sits at the opposite end of a spectrum counterbalanced by Thomas Wolfe and WIlliam Faulkner, and while I can rival neither of those masters, I am much more an eager (if incompetent) disciple at their feet. With Wilder, I don’t even know where to start.
The book is interesting in structure as well as style, a quasi-religious meditation on causality and faith. The eponymous bridge lasts barely an instant, collapsing in the very first sentence only to be raised repeatedly through jaunts backwards in time. Five people fall to their death while attempting to cross it, and a devout friar named Brother Juniper seeks out every detail of their life in hopes of summising some grander purpose that will prove the existence of God.
Most of what follows is a biography of the five ill-fated individuals, with particular focus on three of them: the Marquesa de Montemayor, an epistolary savant pining after her indifferent daughter; Estaban, a man grieving his lost twin brother; and Uncle Pio, an avuncular figure managing a tempermental actress. Their stories intersect in different ways, some of which seem to defy their own causality (Im not sure if this is a deliberate effect, an error on Wilder’s part, or simply a result of my own misreading). Each chapter inevitably ends with the bridge’s collapse, lending a strange air of fatalism to the proceedings.
A great book. I’ll read more from him one day.