The Bridge of San Luis Rey

by Thornton Wilder, Russell Banks (Foreword)

This beautiful new edition features unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.

"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read 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 the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.

This new edition of Wilder’s 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning novel contains a new foreword by Russell Banks.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Historical Fiction, Literature, Book Club, Novels, American

131 pages, ebook

First published November 1, 1927

About the author

Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.

For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton...

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five [who perished in the bridge collapse] will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning…”
- Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

We humans are a lot like automobiles, which start to lose value the moment you drive them off the lot. From the moment we are born, a clock starts ticking, and nothing we do will keep it from counting down to zero. Just to make it a bit worse, we don’t know when the timer was set.

Day to day, we can accept this, even ignore it. Grandparents can enjoy their grandchildren without dwelling on the unlikelihood of seeing them fully grown. We can plant a tree with the acceptance we will never sit beneath its shade. If the end comes naturally, at the end of a respectable sum of years, we can even temper our sadness. All roads, after all, lead to the grave, and there are no exceptions. It is the only fairness that the universe grants.

Sometimes, though, death comes from nowhere and takes the people around us unexpectedly. A car accident or a drug overdose. A drowning or a suicide. A crashing car; a terrorist’s bomb; a boy in a classroom with a gun, pulling the trigger over and over. In those moments, our concepts of the world can shatter. We start to wonder how thick the ice beneath our feet. What keeps us from them?

Every time a plane plummets to earth, there are stories about the passenger who overslept and missed the flight, or who changed his plans at the last moment. This person feels there is a design, that he or she was saved for a reason. But what about the three hundred other people who made it to their seats, and were strapped in till the end?

Is there a divine being governing our lives, or is it caprice alone that governs our fragile existence?

That question forms the core of Thornton Wilder’s slim classic, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

***

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is less a novel or novella than a fable. It tells the story of Brother Juniper, who on June 20, 1714 – as we are told in the opening lines – watches the “finest bridge in all Peru” break and toss “five travelers into the gulf below.” The bridge had spanned the river for a century, and looked like it would last forever; now it had disappeared in an instant.

Brother Juniper, deciding “that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences,” sets out to discover why the bridge chose this particular time to fall, and how it came to be that these five specific people were on it at that fateful moment. Wilder describes the inquiry thusly:

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.

To solve this cosmic riddle, Brother Juniper delves into the backstories of the victim’s, spending six years interviewing people about the rich Dona Maria; her companion, Pepita; the orphan Esteban who was raised at a convent; the bastard-turned-valet Uncle Pio; and the young Don Jaime, whose suffering mother puts him into another’s hands.

The connections between these five are vividly sketched in brief vignettes that form the middle section of this briefest of books.

***

The word that comes first to mind in describing The Bridge of San Luis Rey is simplicity. I mean that in its most virtuous sense. The structure is elegantly functional, describing Brother Juniper’s idea, flashing back to the victims, returning to Brother Juniper, and then making one final timeline shift to bring us to the famous finale. Despite Brother Juniper’s vocation as a monk, this is not a tangled deconstruction of theological tenets.

The prose is clear, readable, and obscures nothing. Its metaphors are plainly recognizable, the sentences mostly without ornament. For all that, it sticks in your mind and your heart. The lines quoted at the top – “a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love” – have given comfort to millions. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, for instance, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair quoted them at a memorial service. When the I-35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River in 2007, those words – appropriately enough – were repeated again.

On the long road to the altar, my now-wife and I broke up, a separation that lasted over a year. Never knowing if I’d hear from her again, she contacted me one day to let me know her father had suddenly died. It was difficult news, for I had adored him. Beyond that, this was one of the first deaths I’d experienced as an adult, my grandparents having all died when I was much younger. For the first time, the full weight of death’s finality landed squarely on my chest. Heading to Hyvee, I looked through the sympathy cards, discovering there were two types, both inadequate. Meanwhile, four million other cards existed making fun of people turning forty. Grief, after all, is hard to distill; middle age much easier.

So I went to the bookshelf instead, pulled down The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and mailed it to her.

***

While I consider Wilder’s straightforwardness a strength, it also subjects The Bridge of San Luis Rey to accusations of triteness. In that way, it’s a lot like Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, which has alternately been hailed as inspiring, and decried as parceling out the wisdom of a fortune cookie. To that end, I would not expect this to hit everyone the same way it hit me.

Still, the inescapability of death belies cynicism. We can doubt that our existence is part of some infinite power’s grand project. We can believe that once the moment of death strikes, we are done. We can harbor the certainty that religion is nothing more than a psychic balm to keep us trudging forward to our unrequited doom. Brother Juniper might disagree, but The Bridge of San Luis Rey doesn’t require you to believe or disbelieve.

It asks only that you love and be loved.

***

Wilder talks about two worlds. But I sometimes like to imagine that the timeline we inhabit is just one of many. That as I write this review in one chronology, I am doing the same thing in another, except that I am slightly richer, and slightly thinner, and have kept more of my youthful hair.

In this fantasy, everyone who has died is alive somewhere else. For example, there is a timeline where my grandparents are still young, and just starting their journeys; and there is a timeline where my brother-in-law, who died at the age of twenty-four, is old and has his own children; and there is a timeline where the kid from my Boy Scout Troop who jumped off the top of a parking garage never went to the garage at all. When I have a crazy dream, I think: well, maybe that was a visit to one of those different worlds, reachable only through the workings of the deep subconscious.

To answer your question: no, I’m not high.

Anyway, in lieu of the possibility of endless parallel worlds unfolding simultaneously, we are left with this one, and the knowledge that it is terribly finite and devoid of any meaning we do not impose upon it. Faced with this, I’m convinced of Wilder’s ultimate contention that love, and the memories that love creates, is the only thing that matters, the only thing that endures.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a beautifully written book full of eternal questions.

If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. And on that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons, that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of their taking off.

There are so many unrelated people in the world, so many different fates and then, unexpectedly, some calamity may tie certain fates together in the most tragic way… Is it a dire misfortune or God’s Divine Providence?

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Crossing so many bridges during our life we inexorably approach the bridge that will collapse under our feet.

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gentle Sarcasm; Sarcasm Nevertheless

It appears to be commonplace among many readers (and several film directors) to interpret this story as a paean to love based on its oft quoted closing “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." Rubbish. The story is patently sarcastic, gently so to be sure, which is part of its artistry, but sarcastic nonetheless. The only examples of love in the story are either obsessive fixation or guilty desire.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a somewhat elliptical re-telling of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Wilder signals this early on in his paraphrase of Shakespeare’s Gloucester: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods." [Wilder: “... to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day.”]. The story shares precisely the same theme as that of Lear: the intelligibility, or lack of it, of providential justice.

The story also shares with Lear a persistent ambivalence about where and how such justice might be perceived. Just as Shakespeare hints at, only to dismiss, the possibility of a benign rationality in Lear’s madness and Cordelia’s death, so Wilder has Brother Juniper searching without result for the divine intention behind six apparently random casualties (I include his own).

Where Wilder differs radically from Shakespeare is in his consistent sarcasm about his context: Spanish American culture, Peruvian colonial administration, the Catholic Church, and every one of his characters. Brother Juniper is his first target: “It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences, and he had long intended putting it there. What he had lacked hitherto was a laboratory.” High comedy or low sarcasm? Wilder then makes his opinion on Juniper’s project clear: “Everyone knew that he was working on some sort of memorial of the accident, and everyone was very helpful and misleading.” The narrative which follows, therefore, is meant to be taken tongue-in-cheek.

The Church suffers some of Wilder’s wittiest jibes. Referencing a work on sewers, he writes that the “...treatise on the laws of hydraulics was suppressed by the Inquisition as being too exciting.” The Archbishop of Peru, a harmless but ineffectual man, makes his entry as “... something in Lima that was wrapped up in yards of violet satin from which protruded a great dropsical head and two fat pearly hands.” Uncle Pio, the likable rogue of the piece “had been reduced for a time to making investigations for the Inquisition, but when he had seen several of his victims led off in hoods he felt that he might be involving himself in an institution whose movements were not evenly predictable.”

Spanish culture is presented by Wilder as a burlesque. The Viceroy, for example, “...had contrived to make exile endurable by building up a ceremonial so complicated that it could only be remembered by a society that had nothing else to think about.” Much is made of the degradation of the Spanish language from its pristine Castilian under the influence of native Peruvians. Only that art originating in the home country was worthy of admiration so that “Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole were tormenting themselves in an effort to establish in Peru the standards of the theatres in some heaven whither Calderón had preceded.”

Individual characters are all comically flawed. The abbess, who acts as a sort of central employment bureau, “... was one of those persons who have allowed their lives to be gnawed away because they have fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of civilization” (referring to her devotion to women’s equality). The prostitute, actress and aspiring socialite, La Perichole (apparently meaning half-breed bitch but untranslated by Wilder) participates in public ritual by holding a “candle in the penitential parades side by side with ladies who had nothing to regret but an outburst of temper and a furtive glance into Descartes.”

Even the victims themselves are treated with an implicit sarcasm. The Marquesa and Pepita die just after discovering their misdirected loyalties. Esteban, being persuaded to live without his brother, falls to his death the next morning. Uncle Pio and Jaime have no sort of conversion at all before they end up in the abyss. Not only is there no discernible pattern, there are no narrative implications of their deaths. They are all merely dead. And Brother Juniper is despised and killed because of his interest in their lives.

Thus it seems to me sentimental claptrap to interpret the story as endorsing the redemptive power of love. Wilder’s various references to love range from the sordid to the inappropriate. Why he would then cap his story with praise of an absent virtue is a mystery those who enjoy melodrama will have to explain. This is farce not tragedy.

Postscript: reality imitates fiction: https://youtu.be/QSU8GozlAKc

[Henry Avila · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the 20th of July, 1714, in the Spanish colony of Peru five people descended to eternity when they fell into an enormous abyss. Ironically as colorful birds sung sweetly nearby a beautiful scene of snowy mountains far away seen, and green vegetation with pretty trees below. The noon collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey not only killed the poor unfortunates, but maybe more important showed the world how precious life is. An uncommon novel because it tells the reader at the very beginning, the ending. Brother Juniper a curious tired Franciscan monk, had stopped to rest and saw the horrible, deadly catastrophe from the road. The distant tiny hurling bodies falling quickly from view, doomed no possible rescue...But unlike others didn't think how lucky he was (he had survived!). His thoughts though were why these beings ? At the mountain Juniper decides to devote himself to finding out all he can about the deceased. Knocking on every door in the small capital city of Lima, talking with the people filling many notebooks writing a long book afterwards, from six years of an exhaustive investigation. Nevertheless can anyone really know another person? The locals were greatly shocked, the land where frequent earthquakes bring sudden death, tidal waves that crush and destroy coastal cities, rampant disease which decimates the frightened population occurs too often. Did they think the century old Inca made bridge of vines and twigs, was going to last forever. Or maybe that much used ancient artificial structure, linking the towns of Lima and Cuzco would always be safe...An "Act of God," as the lawyers say, changed everyone's perspective. A royal old lonely lady, an orphan girl, a surviving grieving twin boy, the uncle of a famous actress and her sickly son all perished on the bridge... Later the somber Requiem Mass at the Cathedral in Lima, for the poor victims with the Archbishop presiding, the Viceroy in attendance as are all the notable people of the city . "There is the land of the living and a land of the dead" said this book " and the bridge is love".....Poignant story that is sad at heart no happy endings , but asks the question is life worth living... You only can answer that...... A new bridge made of stone has been built where the former legendary one was...Symbol of hope and the indomitable spirit of mankind, can prevail over adversity...May it always be that way.

[Blaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A year ago, I bought the Pop Chart 100 Essential Novels Scratch-off Chart. At the time, I had read 11 of the 100 books. Over the last year, I have read 10 more. For the most part, hanging the chart in my library has served to inspire me to read books I’ve long heard of and just never read.

But The Bridge of San Luis Rey is in a different category. I don’t believe I’d ever heard of this book (despite a recent movie with a pretty good cast), and without the chart prodding me, I likely never would have read it all. And correcting that single oversight has made the chart a worthwhile purchase.

“On Friday noon, July twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.” Brother Juniper sees the accident, and resolves to show by proof that their deaths was part of God’s plan for them, because “[e]ither we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.” Thus begins this wonderful meditation on the limits of understanding what’s in another’s heart, and on the search for the meaning in our lives. It is full of interesting characters and profound quotations, especially about love:

But soon we shall die, and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough. All those impulses of love returned to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Published in 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey is from a different era of literature, when it was possible to be both the biggest selling book of the year and win the Pulitzer Prize. But it was worthy of both honors. This is a story with universal appeal told through beautiful writing. Nearly 100 years after it was written, this tale is every bit as moving and insightful today. A timeless must read.

[Emily May · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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."

You might think a book so focused on God and faith would fail to have the desired effect on an atheist like me. But, actually, I think the religious factor of this novel is just a small part of something which affects all of us: our need to question why things happen. When tragedy falls upon our loved ones, or perhaps not even that, perhaps a news story captures our attention of young children involved in a fatal accident, completely in the wrong place at the wrong time - when life presents us with such situations as these, it seems it is a common element of human nature to ask that question which has plagued philosophers, priests, historians and scientists for millennia. Why.

This book begins with the collapse of the San Luis Rey bridge in Peru. Brother Juniper witnesses the disaster and watches as five people plummet to their deaths in the gorge below. He finds himself wondering why those people at that exact point were chosen to die, what it was about their lives that shaped such a destiny for them. We are taken on an emotional journey into the lives of the deceased, exploring questions about life, death, religion, faith and chance. Did these five people die because of some grave sin that doomed their souls? Or was it something far more complicated than that?

"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."

This beautifully written novel captures numerous emotions in a very small amount of pages and also gives the reader an interesting view of the ruling classes in Spanish South America at this time (18th century). The book can be viewed as several gradually entwining short stories which feature very different lives that end in the same unfortunate way. It is quite a painful read, especially when looking at the relationship between Dona Maria and her daughter, the former longing for the latter's love but unsure how to obtain it. Knowing the outcome of each tale adds a looming cloud of despair to the stories and makes the characters' situations that much more tragic.

What many see as this book's major weakness and I found to be its greatest strength was the lack of answers to the questions first pondered by Brother Juniper when he witnessed the collapse of the bridge. Wilder purposely leaves the ending open for interpretation as to whether these people were the victims of chance or deliberately targeted as part of God's greater plan. The only certainty is that, in one way or another, love brought each of those people to that bridge at that exact point. And I believe the ambiguity makes it all the more powerful.

"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

[Lea · Rating 4 out of 5]

“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.”

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a Pulitzer Prize winning short novel tackling the big religious and philosophical questions. The story follows the lives of five victims of the bridge collapse. The crash is witnessed by a monk, brother Jupiter, who in his own fear in the proximity of tragic fate that could easily befall him as well, embarks a civilization-old question; “Why did the tragedy occur to exactly this group of people?”. In searching for answers Jupiter wants to find the thread that connects victims' lives to the tragedy and explain this divine intervention. This is an ancient quest to find the meaning of suffering. Because the greatest pain is not the tragedy, but our incapability to find the meaning in it. Facing the absurd is more excruciating than facing the pain itself. In that sense, this novel made me reminiscent of Camus's The Plague. The character of monk Jupiter is similar to father Paneloux in trying to use an external religious system of belief to impose forced meaning to the senselessness of tragic fate, rejecting the absurd element of life and randomness by which suffering is imposed on young, as well as on old, on good, as well as on bad.

“If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. And on that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons, that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of their taking off.“

Monk Jupiter is determined to subject the mystery of life and death to reason. For him, there are two options, there is a logically detectable system of explanation that is reachable through empirical observation, or there is no explanation at all, no meaning or greater plan of for life.

“It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences, and he had long intended putting it there. What he had lacked hitherto was a laboratory.”

Jupiter's quest unravels the stories of morally gray characters, full of flaws, but also full of imperfect and utterly human love and passion, complex real people that cannot be subjected to pure demise and punishment of sinners nor heavenly glory of saints. Both generous and selfish, cruel and merciful, innocent and sinful, the five characters are an archetypical representation of all of humanity; The Great Mother, The Orphan Girl, The Brother, The Teacher and The Beloved Son. Father Jupiter finds no answer at all, only unfinished life stories carried by flawed and somewhat self-serving love.

“The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.“

Life and death, as well as the complete meaning of suffering, will be not ever subjected and reached by human reason, and that is the quest that only leads to the death of characters that pursuit it, as we can see in brother Jupiter, father Paneloux (The Plague) even Captain Ahab (Moby-Dick or, the Whale). Meaning, fate, love and hope cannot be empirically investigated, proven nor explained. One must be open to the indefinite mysteriousness of the world, and one cannot fool gods with his intellect and find a definite meaning of destiny.

In the famous finishing sentence Wilder detects love as the bridge of life and death and the only meaning, but at the same time throughout the novel shows that in this world, human love is always defective, never the same, and uniquely individual, just as our lives.

"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."

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 3 out of 5]

O meditație asupra relației dintre hazard și necesitate: totul se petrece pentru că așa a vrut Dumnezeu sau totul se petrece la întîmplare?

În data de 20 iulie 1714, în amiaza unei zile de vineri, puntea de rafie - zisă a Sfîntului rege Ludovic - se rupe și 5 oameni pier. A fost un hazard sau lucrarea subtilă a providenței?

Mai bine de șase ani, fratele minorit Juniper cercetează biografiile defuncților și încearcă să tragă o concluzie cu privire la intenția (și motivele) lui Dumnezeu, deși - nu mai e nevoie s-o spun - intelectul divin nu se supune artmeticii folosite de piosul călugăr. Harul și justiția Lui nu se pot cîntări. Ne situăm în domeniul inefabilului. Așadar, nu știm și nici nu vom ști vreodată de ce (și în ce scop) cineva / nimeni a decis prăbușirea punții fix în ziua de 20 iulie 1714. Analiza cantitativă a fratelui Juniper este, neîndoios, o întreprindere eretică. Inchiziția are tot dreptul să-i ardă cartea. Dar Dumnezeu este milostiv și decide să păstreze un exemplar din catalogul lui. Pe exemplarul acesta va lucra Thornton Wilder...

Încercarea de a scruta vrerea lui Dumnezeu mi-a amintit de autobiografia lui Bejamin Franklin. La sfîrșit de săptămînă, tînărul tipograf și viitor diplomat făcea un calcul destul de bizar: aduna faptele bune și obținea o cifră. Aduna faptele rele, păcatele, și mai obținea o cifră. Ca la indicele Hirsch al universitarilor. Din cîntărirea meticuloasă a celor două cifre încerca să deducă dacă se găsește pe calea damnării sau pe aceea a mîntuirii. Era o tentativă îndrăzneață.

Mai bine să pariem pe hazard (adică pe grația haotică a lui Dumnezeu) și să declarăm, ca Pierre-Simon de Laplace odinioară, că ființa divinității este „o ipoteză de care nu avem nevoie, cînd calculăm probabilitatea unui anume efect”.

P. S. În nimicnicia mea, eu cred că rafia din care fusese împletită puntea se rosese în unele locuri esențiale și, la momentul tragediei, pur și simplu s-a rupt. Vinovați au fost meșterii și istoria. Iar istoria e ceea ce face hazardul din ceea ce a făcut Providența...

P. P. S. Micul roman al lui Thornton Wilder (1897 - 1975) a fost tradus de Horia I. Popovici. N-ar fi rău ca o editură să-l reediteze...

[Olga · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was difficult put down this book, maybe because its subject is love in a broader sense. Or maybe because it is so beautifully written with vividly portrayed characters that it was a sheer pleasure to read.

With the help of his elegant prose through the characters' life stories the author poses a lot of philosophical questions such as 'Does God have a plan for each of us?' 'Or do things happen randomly?' 'Does a sudden death have a meaning?' 'How does God (or fate) decide who has to die?' 'Is it possible to measure a person's merits?' 'Does existence have sense?' 'What effect do the people we care about have on our lives when they are alive and after they are gone?'

All these questions are left unanswered but I had a warm feeling having touched the lives of the characters. The story seems to focus on an accident and deaths but what what really matter is if we love and are loved in our lifetime. Love outweighs mortality.

'[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.'
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'We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.'
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'Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.'
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'Her religious beliefs went first, for all she could ask of a god, or of immortality, was the gift of a place where daughters love their mothers; the other attributes of Heaven you could have for a song.'
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'This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.'

[Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey ~~ Thornton Wilder


The Bridge of San Luis Rey has been on my radar for years. Thanks to my friend, Alan, for giving me the kick I needed to return to Wilder.

The themes of The Bridge of San Luis Rey intrigued me since my father passed away several weeks ago.

I first read Thornton Wilder in my early teens. At 14 I was working my way thru the classics of the American stage. As part of that reading project, I read Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, & Our Town. I’ve read both many times thru the years. They are among the greatest plays ever written.

When I entered this universe, I knew very little about this book other than it was written by Wilder ~~ a big draw for me ~~ and Wilder won his first Pulitzer Prize for this ~~ yes, he has more than one.



The story is deceptively simple. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a collection of interwoven stories of five people who died while crossing an incredibly tall Peruvian bridge. Plagued with the seemingly unanswerable question of whether or not these individuals were destined to die, Brother Juniper makes it his mission to learn everything he possibly can about their lives. Rooted in the themes of love, life, death, fate, and art, this novel is more than simply an attempt to answer Brother Juniper’s inquiry; rather, it ponders the very existence of the question in the first place.

Jonathan Yardley said of The Bridge of San Luis Rey , it deals in universals . I agree; here, we learn of Wilder's philosophical views. I can't help but think World War I heavily influenced Wilder's views on life and death and love as well as The Bridge of San Luis Rey .



As I said earlier, I was intrigued by the concept of this novel due to my father's recent death ~~ I view death differently these days ~~ Wilder asks is it possible to reconstruct the lives of those destroyed by tragedy and discover a reason for their deaths? It’s the sort of question that plagues anyone who has lost a loved one. Why did it happen? Was there some sort of reason or purpose? Because death is something that feels so senseless when you’re faced with it. It’s a question that people have sought answers for though religion, and philosophy for thousands of years.

Brother Juniper goes about the question in an entirely different way. He looks at this tragedy thru the eyes of a scientist ~~ science and religion ~~ they fit hand in hand for Brother Juniper. He believes that he can objectively prove and explain God and tragedy, creating a formula of sorts to describe the indescribable.

This is the setup of The Bridge of San Luis Rey . Soon, Wilder describes the lives of the five victims of the bridge collapse. Each is viewed with their own flaws and desires, sorrows and joys. These lives are filled of the same mixed up confusion of emotions and events and actions that we have all experienced. There is nothing neat or tidy about the lives or deaths of any of these characters. These deaths seem senseless and confusing. Some characters have just turned a page and are trying to start anew ~~ others continue down a path of loss and sorrow.

While each of the dead has their own separate and distinct story, they are also all part of a larger story. Their lives intertwine and interact ~~ each have, in some small way, an effect on the others’ lives. During the characters' stories, we see the other victims begin to play a role in each other's lives ~~ I wouldn't be surprised if Wilder was influenced by Hinduism.


What Wilder suggests to us instead is that death is the beginning rather than the end. This too is the message of Our Town. It is the way in which the survivors begin to come together to mourn and attempt to move on from death that concludes the novel. And it is here that Wilder gets at the root of tragedy and loss. It is only the beginning of the story for the survivors. It is the way in which people attempt to cope with loss and death and find themselves and their lives in the aftermath ~~ yes, death is the beginning rather than the end.

I understand this from having recently mourned the loss of my father. It begins with death as we question Why? ~~ we search for answers in the midst of loss. Then we move on to a remembrance of those lost to us. Each of the characters' chapters is a sort of eulogy for the deceased ~~ an in the end, the survivors attempt to find some comfort and means of living their lives in the new reality of loss.



So why should you read The Bridge of San Luis Rey ? It’s a beautifully written story that slowly unfolds as you learn more about these characters. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is filled with humor, sorrow, joy, and every emotion in between, and Wilder, as always, write a beautiful portrait of humanity through each of his characters.

[Jean-Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early in the year 2020 a small earthquake, not uncommon in the state of California, shook the walls and the bookshelves and five of the Reader's books ended up on the floor. He thought nothing of it until the news the following morning announced an almost immediate quarantine, social isolation was what they called it, as a particularly tenacious virus was at that very moment sweeping the Earth. So the Reader looked at his books again, he would have lots of time for reading, and set out to discover why in particular those five books had fallen from his shelf the evening before...

While part of me adores this book, the other part of me despises it. Wilder poses a question, and then never really answers it. Well, he does. Sort of. Is there a concrete answer to such a question? Not really. Right? But that doesn't mean I didn't expect him to come up with something more than a Beatles lyric. (Impressive, some might say, given that when this book was published none of the Beatles had even been born yet.) I know it is absolutely disgraceful to compare it to The Alchemist, but there's that same eye roll inducing hokeyness (or so the despising part of me proclaims). However, Wilder's characters and setting are all beautifully drawn, and so this toxic relationship lives on.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a classic novel that has been on my radar simply because it is on many "must read" lists. A Pulitzer Prize winning best seller that has been made into 3 movies and has occasionally been an influence on other novels, I figured this was a book I should eventually get to.

I am settling on 3.5 out of 5 stars. Not sure if I should round up or round down . . .

The idea was interesting - a monk trying to determine if there is scientific/mathmatical evidence as to why certain people die in tragedies over others. This leads to three intertwined backstories that all end in the collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey. Such a cool concept, it was enough to keep me interested to see what he figures out!

The best part for me was the writing. I like Wilder's writing style and storytelling. It went a long way towards elevating my rating of this book.

My biggest criticism is the stories themselves. They just really weren't all that interesting to me. In fact, after I was done, I went to find a synopsis of the book on Wikipedia to see if I had missed anything - I had not! What I read and remembered is exactly what Wikipedia said. So, perhaps this was more interesting to people living at the time it was released? Sales would seem to indicate so.

I recommend this book if you like classics or need to complete a must read list. But, I think I have just talked myself into rounding down.

[Jason Koivu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not mere writing. This is poetic philosophy.

I'd heard it was good, but I didn't know what to expect from Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. For all I knew, it took place somewhere along the Californian coast along with all the other Sans and Santas. After all, there is the San Luis Rey Mission in San Diego. But no, this is set in Peru. Even better! I love when a story transports me some place I've never been before.

The concept in a nutshell as explained on Wikipedia:

It tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse of an Inca rope bridge in Peru, and the events that lead up to their being on the bridge. A friar who has witnessed the accident then goes about inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic answer to the question of why each had to die. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928.

And well deserved! This is not a family saga of epic proportions. It's short. It's compact. It takes a slice or two of life and examines it. It does this three times for five people. The numbers are only slightly off and the stories don't all focus on one incident, but this is still quite reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa'sRashomon, itself based on two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa.

The people and their problems are varied and interesting. Their choices and why they chose them are made even more so by Wilder. Maybe this isn't 5 star perfection, but it is damn good.

[Labijose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leído allá por 2006 o 2007, que yo recuerde.

Aunque la prosa es buena, y se le notan las hechuras del buen escritor que era, no me atrapó. De hecho, algunos pasajes se me resistieron. Pero, en conjunto, me alegré de haberlo leído, aunque a recomendarlo no me atrevería, por mi experiencia.

[Seemita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me draw a scene for you. You are standing at the balcony of a high rise building and looking down at the busy road of the evening hours. You spot a fleet of coloured cars, nudging each other with a relaxed urgency, you see little boys in nickers and little girls in frocks tugging their mothers for sweet somethings, you see ebullient couples stealing a kiss while keeping an eye on the pedestrians, you locate the lesser-privileged scrapping at the abandoned baskets for respectable leftovers, you see the wanderers leaning on the poles, watching the scene, just like you.

Now, I pull myself up well within your ear’s reach and joining your view, ask you: Does anything bind you to them ? Does anything at all, bind you to any one of them on the road?

With a little thought, both of us would hiss out, yes . At Level 1, it is the world we live in; the air we breathe, the trees we see, the smoke we inhale, the fog we fight - they are all the same for us and them. At Level 2, it is the labyrinth of emotions we hold close; the love we feel, the tears we shed, the impatience we possess, the amusement we harbour – they are common in us and them. And at Level 3, the highest, we are bound by the truth of Life and Death; while on this side of the Life-Death Bridge, we are all huddled into the animated and raucous jungle of Life and once we cross over to the other side of this bridge, our dissimilarities, once again merge into the silent ocean of Death. But who should tell us how to cross this bridge whenever we are called upon to?

There is no easy answer but Wilder tries to give us one in this delicately weaved story of six people. When the imposing Bridge of San Luis Rey, breaks on a fateful day, it goes down taking the lives of five random people in its arms. This incident shakes no Peruvian native as much as Brother Juniper. He is besieged by a strong urge to unearth the reasons behind the choice of victims. Why these five? Was there anything common in them besides their appointed date, time, place and instrument of death?

The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.

In a desire to understand His intentions in a pure state, he sets in motion many interviews, reference sets, neighbourhood versions and historical records to draw concrete evidence about these five people who led largely different lives: An Aristocrat(also A Mother) and Her Help(also An Orphan), A War Veteran and His Find(also A Brother) and A Theatre Personality(also A Teacher). In the flood of motherly affection and in the muck of orphaned loneliness, in the war of distilled priorities and in the swamp of brotherly abandonment, even in the shadow of vanquished lessons, Brother Juniper gropes for the sky that protected these five souls till it burst open on the call of Death.

It is not clear if Wilder wished to reinforce any spiritual truth or religious dogma but he certainly established an inspiring line of beauty in ordinary things, which intersperses a futile life with smoked humor and infectious spunk. He lets the society condemn Brother Juniper’s finding as farcical and baseless but also renders him a certain unquestionable dignity that keeps the curious flame lit under the darkest clouds of doubts and fallacy.

After stroking the picture of each of the five victims with their respective color brushes for a laborious six years, Brother Juniper is sombre at last when the final picture exhibits the masterstroke, merging all the colors into a single shade.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

[Jesse · Rating 2 out of 5]

A typical classic for me....meh.

Once again I fear that I missed the deeper meaning, or maybe it meant something different to people in 1928, I don't know. Maybe there is no deeper meaning. Maybe it was just a mediocre story written by an overly praised author. There's a reason most people haven't heard of this Pulitzer prize winner from 1928, because it's meh. The writing was ok. The story was boring. The characters were unrelatable. I just was not into it at all.

We trace the lives of five seemingly random individuals who happen to be crossing a rickety bridge at the exact moment of its collapse. The collapse is witnessed by a priest who is determined to pin some kind of scientific, spiritual, or cosmic meaning to the whole event. He spends the next six years trying to make heads or tails of it and compiling a massive volume of interviews with anyone who knew the victims. Well, it's all for not in the end as you'll see.

"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

Whatever that means.

[Dolors · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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.” (p.12)

Without the batting of an eye, Thorntorn Wilder’s presents his short story with the dilemma of the nature of the divine will and the resultant conflict between fate and randomness, faith and reason, meaning and absurdity.
Set in the eighteenth century in Perú, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” focuses on the collapse of the mentioned ancestral bridge built during the Inka hegemony that unites the capital of Lima with the merchant town of Cuzco, taking away the lives of five people who happened to be crossing the bridge at the precise moment of the fatal accident.

“Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.” (p.9)
The latent question throbbing behind the scene being whether the hand of God had some doing in the tragedy leads Brother Juniper to doubt and to investigate the five deceased searching for some logical pattern in their deaths while forgetting that the act of believing involves the acceptance of the senseless, which eventually proves catastrophic for the inquiring Brother.

The Marquesa de Montemayor pours her heart writing emotional letters overflowing with lyricism to her daughter Clara, who is married in Spain and who can’t abide her mother, proclaiming her almost obsessive motherly love and her need to feel accepted instead of scorned by her only daughter. Pepita , the Marquesa’s assistant, who was raised by the Abbess in the Convent of Santa María Rosa de las Rosas, selflessly offers her mistress faithful devotion but Pepita’s continuous efforts pass unnoticed by the miserable Marquesa.

Manuel and Esteban are telepathic twins who were left at the same Convent of Santa María Rosa de la Rosas as infants who become scribes. Esteban worships his brother and finds himself in agony when he discovers the secret love Manuel nurtures for Camila Perochile, a famous actress, which threatens the brother’s uncommonly close relationship, making him aware that Manuel’s fraternal love is less profound than his. Esteban’s remorse increases when his beloved brother cuts his knee with a piece of metal and dies from a massive infection, leaving Esteban devastated and without an aim in life.

Uncle Pío is a self-made man; confidant, manager and protector of the aforesaid actress who launches her stellar popularity in the theaters of Lima. After having a romantic relationship with the Viceroy of Perú, which produces three children, Camila decides to stop acting in order to become a true lady. After Uncle Pío’s failed attempt to convince her to return to the stage, he persuades her to allow her only son to accompany him in order to be trained for a year.

When these apparently unrelated people cross the bridge on the fateful Friday on July the twentieth, they are dragged down and irremediably engulfed like insignificant ants by the waters of the river alongside the bridge of San Luís Rey, taking their lives, their dreams and their new resolutions with it. What force propelled them to be walking across the bridge at the particular instant of the misfortune? Were they selected by some Divine Providence for some inscrutable purpose?
Beware though. Because those who survive might obtain less wisdom, might live less intensely than those predestined or fortuitously condemned to death, as Brother Juniper reflects after tragedy strikes: “Everybody knows that in the world we do nothing but feed our wills. Why perpetuate this legend of selflessness? Why keep this thing alive, this rumour of disinterestedness?”

The five deceased characters in Wilder’s story have the commonality of sharing loneliness, heartbreak and despair. Maybe the key to all the unanswerable questions lays there. Maybe the rejected are in need to cross an allegorical bridge to find love and solace, either in the world of the living or in the world of the dead. Maybe insignificant humans are part of an indecipherable greater scheme of the universe. Maybe nothing is scripted and capricious randomness rules the world. But even in the most absurd of scenarios, erring humans will need to cross the bridge of fear and find the courage to love some time or another. And Love, my friend, might be the one and only answer.

“Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” (p.124)

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thinking of how to review this little novel is beginning to take me longer than reading it so let’s just do this. Like a radio station with a dodgy signal sometimes this book is sharp and clear and beautiful and sometimes it’s vague and mushy and hard to hear. Many pages I wanted to turn into wallpaper and paper my house with, so I could read them again when I gazed into the mid-distance looking for inspiration, but others were just blah blah blah about tiresome rich people in Peru in the 18th century. Enough about neurotic actresses and their sycophants! So what you get is potted biographies of three people who got killed when the famous bridge collapsed. You might say it’s an examination of any random death. What is the meaning of it? What is God up to? A humble monk investigates the incident and compiles a massive book. (Okay he can’t be that humble then.) His idea was to prove that God knew what he was doing when he either broke the bridge deliberately or passively allowed the last threads to fray (it was a rope bridge). The concept that the municipality of Lima should have instituted regular bridge inspections and it was their gross negligence in not doing that was the obvious reason for the tragedy is bizarrely not addressed, even though, clearly, that would have got God off the hook. The priest did not have to go rootling around in the lives of these victims to figure if they in some way deserved to die.

Fans of this book quote the last sentence which is about there being a bridge between the living and the dead and the bridge is made of love. But I thought that was the worst bit. It made me feel a bit sick. Maybe I’m a fan of the parts the real fans of this book think are the worst bits!

Well, it’s an oddity and it’s worth your time. 3.5 stars rounded up because I don’t wanna plunge to my death from a frayed rope bridge in Lima, Peru on Friday, July 20th, 1714 or any other day. And so far I haven’t.



This kind of thing.

****


Uncle Pio came of a good Castilian house, illegitimately. At the age of ten he ran away to Madrid from his father’s hacienda and was pursued without diligence. He lived ever after by his wits. He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer – a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongue; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he prayed upon. From ten to fifteen he distributed handbills for merchants, held horses, and ran confidential errands. From fifteen to twenty he trained bears and snakes for travelling circuses; he cooked and mixed punches; he hung about the entries of the more expensive taverns and whispered information into the travellers’ ears – sometimes nothing more dubious than that a certain noble house was reduced to selling its plate and could this dispense with the omission of a silversmith. He was attached to all the theatres in town and could applaud like ten. He spread slanders at so much a slander. He sold rumours about crop and about the value of land.

[Piyangie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

When unexpected tragedies (like accidental deaths) fall on people, we wonder why it happened to them. How did they become the chosen recipient of the calamity as opposed to others? Was it fate or divine intervention? It's a question with no satisfactory answer. Brother Juniper witnesses the fall of the bridge of San Luis Rey while five people cross it. He wonders why those five? Immediately, he makes a theological project of it since he has found his "laboratory" to test God's workings. He inquires into the lives of those five dead people and produces a book. But even with all his efforts, he doesn't find a satisfactory answer to the question. And ironically, his study leads him to his ultimate death.

It's interesting to ponder what Thornton Wilder wanted to convey to his readers through this novel. For a short one, the novel consists of much thought-provoking content. He talks a lot about love, the different kinds of it. So it's natural for me to conclude that the novel was his way of demonstrating the power of love, how it shapes human lives, and also, how death survives love.

But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

However, I also felt that Thornton Wilder was raising the issue of the limitations of the human mind. Brother Juniper's failed project shows that there are forces in this world that are beyond human understanding. Call it fate, God, or nature, the universe is full of mysteries that elude human comprehension. It's egotistical of humans to think that they can find all the answers to the mysteries in life. Brother Juniper's book was declared heretical. It was burned along with its author. Was that ending a warning? Should we leave things beyond our grasp alone? It almost seems that Wilder was predicting destruction for those who venture beyond their limit. It is clear, however, that he firmly believed mankind should focus on love rather than philosophical ponderings.

The premise of the story interested me. I wish I could say the same about the story. Unfortunately, I didn't connect with the story as I hoped. The lives of the victims or those connected with them (except for one or two) didn't interest me much. I simply couldn't get into their stories. I was also a little disappointed in not learning enough about 18th-century Peru and Spain. Imparting historical knowledge hadn't been part of Wilder's project, and I have only myself to blame for false expectations. So instead of 4 stars, I had to settle for 3.5.

More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/

[Ruby Granger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seeing as I study spanish, I loved the hispanic undertones to this book and enjoyed translating snippets from Castilian into English. Not only this, but there was a strong Catholic undercurrent in the novel, no doubt a consequence of the denomination's popularity in the hispanic world, and this made for enjoyable analysing. The novel is told by means of three separate stories, each one sending with the same event: the bridge. It's a beautiful representation of human community and the connections which exist between us. Oh, even if you don't want to read the whole thing, I urge you to find the book and READ THE LAST PAGE!

[AiK · Rating 4 out of 5]

Напрасно думать, что у этого романа нет смысла. Торнтон Уайлдер предельно четко сформулировал его в конце устами матери Марии: "Уже теперь, – думала она, – почти никто не помнит Эстебана и Пепиту, кроме меня. Одна Камила помнит своего дядю Пио и своего сына; эта женщина – свою мать. А скоро и мы умрем, и память об этих пятерых сотрется с лица земли; нас тоже будут любить и тоже забудут. Но и того довольно, что любовь была; все эти ручейки любви снова вливаются в любовь, которая их породила. Даже память не обязательна для любви. Есть земля живых и земля мертвых, и мост между ними – любовь, единственный смысл, единственное спасение".
Брат-францисканец Юнипер - герой романа, который пытается решить задачу, был ли Божий промысел в смертях этих пятерых. Он написал огромный фолиант, но церковь признала его труд ересью и сожгла и книгу, и автора на костре. Он не решил задачу, но создал завязку для размышлений.
Это роман о любви, не о плотской любви, а о любви, которая соединяет и живых, и мертвых, любви не плотской, но любви душ, связанных друг с другом узами ли родства, дружбы, наставничества, ученичества.
Пять историй любви матери к дочери, девочки, готовящейся стать послушницей в монастыре и которую любила наставница, брата к другому брату-близнецу, актрисы к сыну и человеку, сделавшему ее успех, бывшему ей и другом, и любовником, и учителем, и критиком.
Исследование любви приводит к выводам, что она должна высказываться простыми, искренними словами, а не тонким стилем и изящными оборотами, как это делала старая маркиза, что любовь не подразумевает любить за внешнюю красоту, что продемонстрировал Пио, любивший Камилу и после оспы, она предполагает заботу и помощь. Любовь - это терпение, которое проявил Эстебан, ухаживая за умирающим братом и выслушивая его упрёки в соперничестве в любви к Периколе....
Вот об этом эта книга.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pulitzer prize novels have been a mixed bag for me, so I approached this 1927 winner without high expectations, especially as the movie version I have seen a few years back, has been OK, but not all that memorable.

Well, I changed my opinion in only a couple of pages, as I kept picking post-it notes to put down ideas and quotes. First, I was attracted by the sparse elegance of the text and the quotable sparkling of the author's wit, but these estethical delights were soon overshadowed by the pain and suffering of the characters, both the ones that perished in the collapse of the San Luis Rey bridge, and those left behind.

The book opens with an introductory chapter, where the author - like a good teacher - sets up the homework subject for his students/readers. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan monk, is witness to the collapse of an ancient Inca bridge in 1714, and decides to divine God's plan for humanity by trying to find out why the five victims of the accident were chosen and not someone else:

If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

Set in a period of time when the Inquisition still dominates the Spanish World, it takes courage to try to figure things out by yourself instead of accepting blindly the dogma handed down from the leaders of the Church, but brother Juniper, like every one of us, has doubts and will spend six year combing through every little detail of the five lives that were cut short:

He merely wanted to prove it, historically, mathematically, to his converts — poor obstinate converts, so slow to believe that their pains were inserted into their lives for their own good. People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.

The author has stated that the idea of the novel came from conversations with his own father about the nature of Divinity: Strict Puritans imagine God all too easily as a petty schoolmaster who minutely weights guilt against merit, and they overlook God's 'Caritas' which is more all-encompassing and powerful . This theme of trying to determine what validates a life and what purpose, what road is the proper one to pursue in a probably arbitrary universe, is one I can become fully involved with, even if I don't personally subscribe to any established cult.

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.


After the slightly academical introduction, the rest of the story leaves brother Juniper at his task, and concentrates on the character of the victims. Here the talent of the author really shines, both in painting a vibrant interior life in only a couple of paragraphs, and in going directly at the essence of each person's motivation, ignoring the trivial details that will hobble brother Juniper inquest. From the first story, of Dona Maria, Marquesa de Montemayor, and her companion Pepita, it becomes clear that the defining trait to be studied will be the capacity for love: in the case of Dona Maria - parental love, and Pepita - filial love. Later the theme of love will be replaced by the need for courage, for leaving behind selfishness and for honesty in admitting your own mistakes.

The second story is about brotherly love and passionate love, self sacrifice and the pain of surviving the loss of a loved one. Esteban and Manuel are identical twins, raised in a convent and later sharing adventures on the road as they try their hand at temporary jobs. Esteban is defined initially by his devotion to his brother, and later by remorse about things left unsaid and paths not taken.

The third story is my favorite : the tale of the born adventurer, thrill seeker, free spirit and libertine aesthete - Uncle Pio. he is an older man who has probably seen everything and tried everything at least once. He is weary and world wise, but entirely without bitterness : His eyes are as sad as those of a cow that has been separated from its tenth calf. . As a modern day Pygmalion, he finds a rough jewel of a girl singing popular songs in a taverna, and he will take her under his wing, train her and cherish her into a formidable career as the greatest actress of her time. When his protegee is turning away for him, he tries to start over with her son, the fifth and last victim of the accident, and the embodiment of the perfect innocent in this game of weighing rights and wrongs. From Uncle Pio comes my favorite passage, one that reminded me of Chance Wayne from "Sweet Bird of Youth" and his observation in the lighthouse about how there are only two kinds of people in the world. This is the same thing, coming from Thornton Wilder:

He divided the inhabitants of this world into two groups, into those who had loved and those who had not. [...] He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.

I have mentioned the central characters in the drama at San Luis Bridge, but the survivors are as important to the story as these five. They are intermingled with the fate of the five, coming in and out of their lives in a game of "six degrees of separation" where everybody is ultimately connected with everybody else and part of the same tapestry.

- Captain Alvarez - endlessly travelling to the far corners of the world in order to forget the loss of a beloved daughter, friend of the Abbess, and guest of the Viceroy's late night parties. His advice about coping with pain and loss is worth noting : We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn't for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You'll be surprised at the way time passes.

- Don Andrés de Ribera, the Viceroy of Peru - bedridden by gout, epicurean in taste, apathetic and disillusioned in his exile from the intellectual pleasures of the metropolis, he is redeemed by his passion for La Perichole and by his philosophical meetings with Uncle Pio, Captain Alvarez and the Archbishop. The richness of the Spanish cultural heritage shines in their dialogues in a way that reminds me of another favorite author, describing Madrid cultural scene about 100 years earlier: Arthuro Perez-Reverte.

- Camila Perichole, born Micaela Villegas - uncle Pio's Galateea, the darling of the Lima theatre goers, talented and ambitious, charismatic and insecure in her success. She moves between the twin brothers, the Viceroy, Uncle Pio, The Abbess, like a liant to the disparate stories gathered that fatefull day on the bridge. For her, I have selected a passage describing travelling with Uncle Pio, an invitation to enjoy life and adventure: They went to Mexico, their odd clothes wrapped up in the self-same shawl. They slept on beaches, they were whipped at Panama and shipwrecked on some tiny Pacific islands plastered with the droppings of birds. They tramped through jungles delicately picking their way among snakes and beetles. They sold themselves out as harvesters in a hard season. Nothing in the world was very surprising to them. .

- Abbess Madre María del Pilar - the rock anchoring the drifting lives of the other characters, the one the author will choose to close the novel instead of the clueless brother Juniper, with his slide rules and tables putting numerical value to a person's piety, usefullness and goodness. She is the dedicated worker for the poor, the sick, the abandoned, the lost souls, the one to emulate and admire for not giving up the thankless job of moving the world forward. Her closing remark about the power of love to bridge the chasm between the living and the dead is well documented, so I will end my review with another of her revelations:

"Now learn," she commanded herself, "learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace"

------------------------
There's a reason this book vas voted among the best 100 novels of the 20th century. My recommendations is to read it and find out why.

[Ines · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m having a hard time reviewing this book. It seems an insignificant booklet that deals with a strange story, a stubborn monk who tries to find a connection that logically links the death of five people in the collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey in 1714... OK, you will say, why can such a theme be so hostile in its understanding?
It made me think a lot once finished it, a book that seems to be conceived giving the reader multiple ways and possibilities of reading...
Historical: with many historical references of the Spanish conquests, on the sacred music of the 16th century with Da Victoria,Allegri and Palestrina and the diffusion of their choral music masterpieces in the new world...
Linguistics and philology: a very special use of words and terms, a way of using old but not ancient terminologies, the version translated into Italian is wonderful!!! much has been left in the dialogues in Spanish, and the language in the dialogues is in Italian not ancient but in the vernacular of the late 18th century.
Literary: here I am not very expert, but I have seen some connections, paraphrases similar to the works of Shakespeare and Miguel da Cervantes.....
Religious: for someone, it would seem the most hidden part, but paradoxically Wilder knows his business, and making these wonderful characters talk, who have nothing to do or very little with Faith and religion.( just think of the Marquesa de Montemayor) We find them in the midst of their daily life, a life that is not far from the feeling of our heart today. Love, loneliness, sadness, despair, sloth..... but why Wilder puts them before us and puts them before us as poor, sinful people? Why make us a list of poor people like all of us and then pretend to find some connection in the misfortune that will see them united in death? Even the Monk Juniper does not seem sure of his research, seems convinced to have taken the right path studying the component of goodness, devotion and humility to then remain kneeling to an overwhelming reality...the Mystery of God that moves our lives, and how the Grace of salvation and change can transfigure us despite a life dedicated solely to iniquities....
I am troubled by the last sentence of the book Soon we will die, and every memory of those five will disappear from the earth, and we ourselves will be loved for a short time, and then forgotten. But love will have sufficed; all those motions of love return to the Love that created them. Not even memory is necessary to love. There is a world of the living and a world of the dead, and the bridge is love, only survival, the only meaning"

Quid es veritas? Quid es amor? Omnia vincit amor




Mi sento in difficoltà a recensire questo libro, lo dico subito.. sembra un libretto insignificante che tratta una storiella un pò stramba, un monaco ostinato che cerca di trovare un nesso che leghi in modo logico la morte di cinque persone nel crollo del ponte di San luigi Rey nel 1714.... ok, voi direte, perchè mai un tema del genere può essere così ostile nella sua comprensione?
Mi ha fatto riflettere molto una volta terminato, un libro che sembra essere concepito donando al lettore molteplici vie e possibilità di lettura...
Storica: con tantissimi riferimenti storici delle conquiste spagnole, sulla musica sacra del 16 secolo con Da Victoria, Allegri ,Palestrina e la diffusione dei loro lavori nel nuovo mondo...
Linguistica e filologia: un utilizzo particolarissimo delle parole, una modalità di utilizzare terminologie desuete ma non antiche ( la versione tradotta poi in italiano) è meravigliosa!!! tanto è stato lasciato nei dialoghi in spagnolo, e il linguaggio nei dialoghi è in italiano non antico ma in volgare del primo 800.
Letteraria: qui non sono molto esperta, ma vi ho visto dei nessi, parafrasi simili alle opere di Shakespeare e Miguel da Cervantes.....
Religiosa: per alcuni sembrerebbe la parte piu' nascolta, ma paradossalmente Wilder sa il fatto suo, e facendo parlare questi meravigliosi personaggi, che nulla hanno da spartire con la Fede e la religione..( basti pensare alla Marquesa de Montemayor), li troviamo nel pieno del loro vivere quotidiamo, un vivere che non è lontano dal sentire del nostro cuore d'oggi. Amore, solitudine,tristezza, disperazione, accidia..... ma perchè quindi Wilder c e li pone davanti così come dei poveri Cristi peccatori? perchè farci un elenco di povera gente come tutti noi e poi pretendere di trovarci un qualche nesso nella disgrazia che li vedrà uniti nella morte? Anche frate Ginepro non pare sicuro di questa sua ricerca, sembra convinto di aver intrapreso la strada giusta studiando la componente di bontà, devozione ed umiltà per poi rimanere inginocchiato al una schiacciante realtà...il Mistero di Dio che muove le nostre vite, e come la Grazia di salvezza e di cambiamento possa cambiarci nonostante un vita dedita unicamente alle iniquità.....
Mi lascia inquieta l'ultima frase con cui si chiude il libro Presto moriremo, ed ogni memoria di quei cinque sarà scomparsa dalla terra, e noi stessi saremo amati per breve tempo, e poi dimenticati. Ma l'amore sarà bastato; tutti quei moti d'amore ritornano all' Amore che li ha creati. Neppure la memoria è necessaria all' amore. C'è un mondo dei viventi e un mondo dei morti, è il ponte è l'amore, la sola sopravvivenza, il solo significato"
Quid es veritas? Omnia vincit amor

[Connie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first sentence of this novella grabs our attention: "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." Brother Juniper was a witness to the terrible event and wondered why these five people were the victims. Was it fate or divine intervention?

For six years Brother Juniper studied the lives of these five people looking for patterns in their lives, or reasons that their deaths might be part of God's plan. The narrator claims to know even more about the five victims and the people important to them. The common theme running through their lives, and extending into the future, is love in many forms. "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." Readers who like literary fiction should enjoy this Pulitzer Prize winner.

[Lesle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short novel won the Pulitzer in 1927 for Wilder. He won the Pulitzer for his play Our Town in 1938 and another play in 1942, yes that is three Pulitzer Prizes.

Five people from Peru had several parallels in their lives, interconnecting and overlapping and even intertwining. They were also sent away by loved ones or experienced some kind of loss of ones they loved, making them feel unloved. Each taking the step across the bridge to a life of love or new meaning of happiness. Searching. While crossing the bridge they plunge to their death when the Incan rope footbridge collapes.

Wilder tells the stories of these travellers and we are asked to examine whether there is any reason that God would choose these specific people for this fate of "Why do bad things happen to good people." The sixth victim is a deeply faithful Monk, Brother Juniper, who witnesses the accident. He has this mission to try and prove that God is real and documents the stories of each of the five lives.

The unbelievably difficult questions of WHY? Was it evil or indifference? Why was this their fate?
In the end Brother Juniper is put to death for his research.

The writing is subtle, you are left to find your own thought provoking questions and answers to the WHY? The first and last chapters are the walls for support of the middle chapters.

Beautifully written.

[Paula Mota · Rating 4 out of 5]

Em breve morreremos e toda a memória desses cinco terá desaparecido da Terra, e nós próprias seremos amadas por um instante e depois esquecidas. Mas o amor terá sido suficiente; todos esses impulsos de amor regressam ao amor que os criou. Nem mesmo a memória é necessária para o amor. Há uma Terra dos vivos e uma Terra dos mortos e a ponte é o amor, a única sobrevivência, o único sentido.

Muitos anos após a sua extinção, a editora Difel continua a ser um repositório de tesouros para quem tem a sorte de ainda possuir exemplares dos seus livros em casa ou de se cruzar com eles em alfarrabistas. É raro o livro que não tenha qualidade literária e “A Ponte de San Luis Rey” é mais um exemplo de tal regra, em que o Prémio Pulitzer me parece, de facto, merecido. Thorton Wilder foi um escritor norte-americano do início do século XX, amigo de Zelda e Scott F. Fitzgerald, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gertrude Stein e Hemingway, e apesar do sucesso que foi esta obra, ficaria mais conhecido como dramaturgo.
“A Ponte de San Luis Rey” começa em 1714, com um monge franciscano a assistir à queda de uma ponte de vime construída pelos incas no século anterior, que lançou cinco pessoas para o vazio. Não dá, porém, origem a uma história catastrófica tão em voga no cinema dos anos 80 e 90, mas antes a uma meditação filosófica e teológica por parte de Frei Junipero que pretende averiguar se se tratara de um mero acidente ou de um plano de Deus, que escolhera aquelas cinco vítimas e não outras.

Alguns afirmam que nunca saberemos e que para os deuses somos como moscas que os garotos matam num dia de Verão, e alguns dizem, pelo contrário, que nem os próprios pardais perdem uma pena que não tenha sido arrebatada pelo dedo de Deus.

Durante seis anos, o franciscano vai de porta em porta a informar-se sobre as cinco pessoas, coligindo dados e conclusões numa enorme obra que, em tempos da Santa Inquisição, é prontamente queimada em praça pública juntamente com o seu autor, apesar de ser pouco mais do que um conjunto de generalizações.

Ele pensou ter visto no mesmo acidente os maus atingidos pela destruição e os bons chamados mais cedo para o Céu. Pensou ter visto o orgulho e a riqueza confundidos como uma lição de coisas para o mundo, e pensou ver a humildade coroada e compensada para edificação da cidade.

Não se pense, porém, que se trata de um tratado árido sobre religião, porque a questão com que Junipero se debate é apenas um pretexto para Wilder executar um estudo cativante de três personagens: a Marquesa de Montemayor, uma aristocrata alvo de chacota; Esteban, um dos irmãos gémeos abandonados num convento; e o tio Pio, um empresário teatral. Ainda que estas três figuras não se conhecessem, ligavam-nas duas outras, a Madre Maria del Pilar e a actriz Camila Periloche, a primeira conciliadora e protectora, a segunda causadora de atrito e desilusões, e acima de tudo, uma emoção comum: o desgosto.
“A Ponte de San Luis Rey” está escrito num estilo reflexivo soberbamente compensado com um tom sardónico.

Tremeu de indignação: rugiu para o seu secretário e mandando-o trazer o seu material de escrita, anunciou que ia ditar uma mensagem devastadora para os seus pastores. Mas não havia tinta no tinteiro; não havia tinta no quarto ao lado; não se encontrou tinta em todo o Palácio. Este estado de coisas na sua casa indignou de tal modo o bom homem que ele adoeceu em consequência daquela conjugação de indignações e isso ensinou-o a nunca mais se indignar fosse lá com o que fosse.

E ambientado no Peru colonial do século XVIII, é uma arguta crítica às classes dirigentes de então.

Todas as famílias viviam numa espaventosa atmosfera de costume e beijavam-se uns aos outros com secreta indiferença. Ela via que as pessoas deste mundo se movimentavam numa armadura de egotismo, ébrias de autocontemplação, sedentas de elogios, mal ouvindo o que se lhes dizia, não se comovendo com os desastres que atingiam os seus amigos mais próximos.

O Vice-Rei do Peru, era o que restava de um homem encantador (…). Da mesa tinha recebido a gota; da alcova uma tendência para as convulsões; (…) raramente ouvia o que quer que fosse que lhe diziam e falava para o tecto num perpétuo monólogo; o exílio, oceanos de tédio, um tédio tão persuasivo que era como a dor – acordava com ele e passava o dia com ele, e tinha-o toda a noite sentado ao lado da cama vigiando-lhe o sono.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.”
Forty years ago, a childhood friend of mine, almost ecstatic, pointed out the ingenious beauty of this small book from 1927, which he saw as the stylistic and philosophical pinnacle of American literature. For some reason I never got around to reading it myself, until now. My reading experience can be summarized in one sentence: fascination after the opening chapter, slight confusion after the subsequent life stories, and finally frustration with the unwinding of the story.

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) does indeed tell a very concise story with a fascinating intrigue: was it the hand of God that made collapse a rope bridge in Peru, in the early 18th century, and caused the death of 5 people, or was this pure coincidence? It is the classic philosophical-religious dilemma of divine providence, blind destiny, and human free will. Curiously, in the story it is a Franciscan friar, Brother Jupiner, who uses the disaster to solve this eternal problem once and for all by systematically mapping the characteristics of the victims and weighing them up in quantitative terms. “Nice approach”, I thought, because with this Wilder seemed to illustrate the classic Western scientific method on this dilemma, “I wonder how that will end”.

But then Brother Jupiner disappears from the scene, and Wilder himself briefly sketches the life stories of some (not all) of the victims. They turn out to be ingeniously intertwined; they also share being stuck in life, solitary and lonely, even bitter; and fate (the collapsing bridge) appears to strike just when a turning point in their lives was in view. In the end Jupiner pops up again, with his systematic-scientific method, but he has to conclude that he too has found no satisfying answer to the philosophical dilemma. On the contrary, because of his investigations, he gets into trouble with the Inquisition. In fact, you could not expect otherwise, Wilder too must leave open the question of divine providence, blind destiny or human free will; but he does this in a very sarcastic way.

But then there is that famous closing paragraph, an ode to love: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” I am not going to haggle on this wonderful quote, but someone should explain to me where this element is incorporated in the previous stories? I didn’t see it, on the contrary, Wilder gave a very sarcastic touch to the lives of his characters, with hardly any place for love. So I think Wilder could have made so much more of this booklet. He wrote a nice little novel, with a lot of potential and with some nice oneliners, but also a missed opportunity.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
This is a brief novella which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 and is often mentioned in lists of the greatest novels. It is set in Peru and is centred on the collapse of a rope bridge which killed five people. A Franciscan witnesses the collapse and sets out to find out why those five people died and not others. Brother Juniper feels that the mind of God must be logical and knowable and there must be a scientific method of working out why those particular people die. He therefore sets out to find out all he can about the five who died and their stories are the bulk of the book.
Brother Juniper sets out all his information and is unable to come to any firm conclusions. Unfortunately the Church takes a dim view of his work and he and his book are burnt. Wilder said that his work was a reflection on arguments he had with his father, who was a strict Calvinist. Wilder was asking “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?” It isn’t about why bad things happen to good people there are no conclusions, only ambiguity. I am going to be predictable and quote the same passage everyone else does, because it hits the nail on the head in relation to what Wilder was saying;
“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and then forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
It is indeed all about love. Whatever other philosophical and religious questions are being pondered, this is the point; the real bridge is not physical but in and of the heart.
This is why the novel is so often quoted and well remembered. Novelists and writers as varied as David Mitchell, Ayn Rand, John Hershey and Stephen King have referenced it. There have been three films (one starring Kathy Bates, Robert De Niro, Gabriel Byrne, F Murray Abraham and Geraldine Chaplin amongst others). There has even been an opera! Tony Blair quoted it at the memorial service for the 9/11 attacks.
It isn’t sentimental or maudlin (well perhaps just a little), but it is about the links between people rather than links between humans and some cosmic schoolmaster reckoning scores and meting out “accidents”.

[Kemper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this and it started with an incredible opening sentence. But the whole thing remained curiously flat to me despite some detailed sympathetic characters and an interesting premise. I think my reaction may have more to do with my state of mind than the book itself. It’s the middle of a long hot summer, and my literary cravings are running to crime thrillers and sci-fi that I can easily absorb as I cower from the sun in the house with the central AC on so high that the senses become numb. Or to shake off the frostbite, I’ll brave the heat on the shady part of the deck but it takes a lot of cold beer to make that tolerable. Those conditions aren’t ripe for books that make you think too much.

In the early 1700s in Peru, five random travelers are in the wrong place at the wrong time when crossing an old Incan bridge and go splat. A priest got obsessed on figuring out if those victims ‘deserved’ their fate any more than the lucky bastards who just missed being on the bridge. The book gives a glimpse at the trials and tribulations of the people who died and the circumstances that had them on the bridge at that exact moment.

There’s some great writing and good characters here, but there’s also an aloofness that makes you feel above caring about what happened to these people. From the afterward in this edition, Wilder deliberately kept the reader at a distance so that we can view what happened somewhat dispassionately. For my taste, he did it a little too well because this didn’t have much emotional impact to me. This is one that I ended up admiring as a technical accomplishment rather than liking as a story.

[sAmAnE · Rating 3 out of 5]

پل سن لوئیس ری، یکی از بزرگ‌ترین پل‌ها در کشور پرو شکسته میشه و ۵ نفر از دنیا می‌روند. داستان با نثر و ایده‌ای خلاقانه به بررسی زندگی افرادی که به نوعی درگیر این ماجرا شده‌اند میپردازد، به نظرم داستان و ایده‌پردازی جالب بود.
برنده‌ی جایزه‌ی پولیتزر سال 1928