We all have a worldview (don't we?) that influences just about everything we encounter. Literature is no exception. Perhaps that is why I thought the main point of Thornton Wilder's outstanding The Bridge of San Luis Rey was so obvious.

In many of the reviews I've read, many have stated that Wilder leaves the main conclusion up to the reader. I must disagree. The final line, so quoted by many of the reviewers, makes it all very clear to me. "All those impulses of love return to the love that made them." Perhaps, had Wilder capitalized the second "love" more would have drawn the same conclusion as I. That love is, of course, the love of the Father.

This short book is rooted in Christian realism -- summed up in that final page. Life and God's ways as they pertain to life, are a mystery to the believer. Seemingly saintly people die far too early in inexplicable circumstances-- a bridge that has lasted for centuries one day breaks under the weight of an old woman, a cripple, an old man, a young girl, and a young man. But the "why" is not for us to know. We all must live in the comfort that it is His will that reigns, not ours, and that the love which sustained us in this life will see us to the next.

Perhaps Brother Juniper found his answer. I know I recognized mine. ( )

Meh

Sure, this is well written. But there is just nothing here that makes me care, makes me want to continue reading, makes me understand why it is so well regarded. (The Pulitzer???) A bridge crashes and Brother Juniper decides to learn about the lives of the people killed. The people are of some interest, and their lives mingle slightly. But none of the lives are interesting enough to warrant my time. Nor, are any of the personal discoveries (the people’s, the brother’s, mine) worth the time. The only thing this has going for it is that it is a quick read. Yet, even being quick, it is not really worth the time. ( )

Favorite Lines:Why did this happen to those five? If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriosly, latent in those lives cut-off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. Some say that we will never know and that to the Gods we are like the flies t at 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. For such authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds and these productions that seem remarkable to us were little better than a day's routine to them. The perfume of a tenderness, that ghost of passion which in the most unexpected relationship can make a whole lifetime devoted to irksome duty pass like a gracious dreamShe hurled herself against the obstinancy of her time in her desire to attach a little dignity to women...Looking back from our century we can see the whole folly of her hope. Twenty such women would have failed to make any impression on that age. Yet she continued dilligently in her task. She resembled the sparrow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised of every age. They obstinately insist on transporting their grains of wheat and they derive a certain exhileration from the sneers of the bystanders. What she had lost as religion as faith, she had replaced as religion as magic.Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth and we ourselves will 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 menory 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. ( )

Thorton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Bridge of San Luis Rey is an excellant book. Written over 80 years ago the central theme is still as relevent today as it was in 1927. The outline theme is that 5 people die when the bridge collapses. SO why is it these 5 people when thousands traveled over the bridge everyday. These questions are contemplated every time a tragedy occurs. Wilder's structure and prose are second to none. This is a short novel but well worth the read. ( )

Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, 1928.

The best stories are morality tales, and the best of those are ambiguous, leaving the reader or listener to draw their own conclusions. Wilder wrote a stunning example in The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

A short book (just 107 pages in my edition), Wilder writes in a deceptively simple style--that of a narrator who recounts and summarizes Brother Juniper’s investigations into the lives of 5 people who were suddenly and without warning thrown to their deaths when the famous bridge at San Luis Rey in Peru--constructed by the Incas and having stood for centuries--suddenly breaks on July 20th, 1714. Brother Juniper, who has long held a theory about God’s reasons for terminating some lives and not others in seemingly random accidents, is convinced that he can uncover God’s plan for these five people if he digs deep enough into their lives.

What follows in Wilder’s book is an account of those five lives, all of which, in some fashion or another, are interconnected with one of them, the Marquesa de Montremayor.

Wilder’s language style appears to be deceptive simple, somehow fits perfectly with the era and the place. My edition has an afterword by Tappan Wilder, the author’s nephew, who discusses Wilder’s love of French literature and particularly the letters of the Marquese de Sévigné, on whom the Marquesa de Montremayor is modeled. The linguistic style of these 17th century letters with its emotional distance and irony imparts a powerful impact to the story, especially to the conclusion, which Tony Blair read at a memorial for those who died on September 11, 2001:

“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves will 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.”

There are few books that linger on in my mind after I read them, no matter how much I’ve enjoyed them. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is one of those precious few.

Highly recommended. ( )