The Bridge of San Luis Rey

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, from its memorable opening line to its closing memorable line, and all its vividness in between. It was enjoyable to be not only so skillfully entertained but to be asked, without layers of subterfuge, the deepest philosophical question a person will ever ask at some point in their life. And I love the answer that I felt Wilder lead me to find within.

(Spoilers below.)

It's interesting that the church (who is supposed to lead us to those answers) finds Brother Juniper's work heretical. Here it is, the basic theological question, "Do we matter to God?" and the good monk is convinced the answer is Yes. But even after years of probing all the smallest pieces of evidence in the lives of the five, he feels he show more has never gained a firm understanding of the mind of God. The church judges, corrupt and barely tolerant of the question, certainly couldn't stand an unfinished answer and so condemns him in notorious Spanish Inquisition fashion. Consumed by his fiery fate, the monk never doubts God, only himself. He is the epitome of faith, believing while having no answers.

It is an interesting contrast, too, that while the pious monk's work is burned (and the other copy forgotten on a dusty shelf) the Marquesa's letters go on to great fame. The words of the drunk, the awkward, the laughable, the sincere-but-misguided Marquesa lives and inspires for centuries, an example of the fickle unpredictability of what matters and what doesn't in mere human annals.

Ultimately it's the nun, Madre Maria, who is affected in the most profound way by the collapse of the bridge and it's her thoughts on life's divine meaning that ends the novel so beautifully. She comes to believe that no, her life's work doesn't matter and that not even being remembered fondly by loved ones matters because those that remember will die soon, too. She concludes it is the love itself that matters to God. It is our love -- love by human beings destined to be unremembered and often unrewarded -- that matters by returning to "the love that made them." It's not God's love for us, or our love for God, but our love for one another is the real divine exchange, that which has its source from and that which returns to God. It is the only meaning, the only bridge between man and God. show less

Thornton Wilder successfully fictionalized some ages-old core existential questions that have haunted humanity since its inception in his short novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Why do bad things happen to good people indiscriminately, while bad people prosper? Is there a plan or purpose behind the bad happenings? A reason? Are seemingly senseless accidents such as the one depicted in the novel -- the collapse of a bridge, a "ladder of thin slats swung out over a gorge, with handrails of dried vine" -- or other bad happenings such as natural disasters, poverty or war, "acts of God" or acts of fate? Or neither or something else? Are they meaningful or meaningless? If those who fell to their deaths in Wilder's novel died because God show more willed them to die, as Brother Juniper's order believes, is it then a capital offense to seek proof to that effect through non-Catholic means? Complicated, convoluted questions, even for skeptics, raised by this slim, but intense, and beautifully written novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

Wilder, of course, doesn't explicitly answer these universal questions, though by novel's end, our narrator, Brother Juniper, eyewitness to the collapse: "He saw the bridge divide and fling five gesticulating ants into the valley below..." certainly, in part, has answered some of them. In some socks-you-in-the-gut, brutal irony, Brother Juniper, after he's dared ask why -- why did these people die?, why did the bridge collapse for them instead of others? -- and then travelled by foot great distances to probe the lives and personal histories of those who fell for possible clues to answer these deeper questions that are only natural for an inquisitive mind's pursuit, ultimately becomes the sixth and final victim of the bridge of San Luis Rey's collapse.

Brother Juniper lacked the foresight in recognizing how dangerous his questions were in a culture whose pious insularity accepted nothing less than rote avowals of faith in God's sovereign will. Moreover, and to the practical point, Brother Juniper was stealing time from his ascetic duties to solitude and prayer in order to play detective. In the least he was egregiously undisciplined; at worst, a heretic. But his fellow monks had it wrong. Brother Juniper wasn't looking to discredit God, but rather sought in his investigations a way to prove God's sovereignty, to affirm his faith in God not just by faith but facts.

Brother Juniper's decision to mix his intellect with his faith, instead of abiding strictly by faith alone; which he denied the second he began his investigation into why those five unfortunate travelers may have perished when, where, and how they perished, was not surprisingly condemned on the spot as insubordination and blatant blasphemy, an unforgivable rejection of faith in God and the most holy and sacred tenets of Catholicism. How dare a middling monk not take God automatically on faith! Who did this insignificant little man, Brother Juniper, think he was, embarrassing the Church like that with his foolish questions? And so for the supposed unpardonable sin of suggesting God's will -- God's very mind -- could be accessed through an investigation, through the woefully finite human insight of what amounted to empiricism, Brother Juniper, a devout Catholic, became essentially a martyr for science.

If there are any answers in this indifferent universe that can even partially explain how Evil and Human Suffering can comfortably coexist alongside a purported All-good and Omnipotent God, an All-wise Deity to be trusted and praised by His adherents even when disasters on a scale more monstrous than the collapse of a flimsy, make-believe bridge in Peru occur ... say the collapse of the Twin Towers, the collapse of the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or the unending collapse that has been Genocide throughout the ages, continuing still today in Syria ... then it's clear to me that Brother Juniper (one of my favorite catholics real or fictitious ever!) was at least partly successful in his heroic -- and in my opinion faithful -- quest for truth. show less

”On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” So begins Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a timeless parable, properly lauded as one of the great novels in American literature. Brother Juniper, a monk who happens to witness the tragedy, seeks to prove that some divine intervention rather than chance led to the deaths of those particular five victims. Wilder’s seemingly simple narrative belies the deep underlying complexities of emotions that weave through the story: love and respect, fear and jealousy, pain and insecurity; and the nuances that give deeper insight into the human condition. As I can attest, it is not uncommon to show more completely miss the message and the meaning after an initial reading of the book. This is a rich, powerful, and profound novel whose beauty, clarity, and poignancy comes ever clearer with successive readings. show less

Summary: A friar witnesses the collapse of a woven rope bridge with five people falling to their deaths and tries to discern some reason why, in God’s providence, each of them died.

It’s the unanswerable question we struggle with in every untimely death. We try to find some reason to explain why the death or deaths occurred, often some version of “it was God’s time,” or “they were too good for earth,” or that there was some sinful reason why they died. In the end we are left with uncertainty–none of these rationalizations satisfy or comfort and most explanations seem cruel or trite.

That is the premise of this Thornton Wilder story, which launched his literary career, winning him a Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and creating show more the opportunity for him to live a life of teaching and writing. Brother Juniper has just come into view of the woven rope bridge over a river gorge between Lima and Cuzco when the bridge collapses, sending five people on the bridge to their death. As a theologically oriented religious man, he sets himself the task to find evidence in their lives that would demonstrate that this was God’s plan for each person.

After the opening chapter, which lays out the premise of the story, the next three represent the account of six years of research on the part of Brother Juniper, talking to everyone who knew those who fell. The first concerns Dona Maria, the Marquesa de Montemayor, a difficult woman estranged from her daughter, who lives in Spain, and her companion Pepita, a young girl being groomed by Madre Maria de Pilar, to succeed her in the work of abbess of the orphanage where Pepita grew up. The two go on pilgrimage to a shrine so that Dona Maria can pray for her pregnant daughter. While she is praying, Pepita writes a letter to Madre Maria that Dona Maria sees, of how difficult life is with her. Pepita destroys the letter before Dona Maria confronts her, deciding it was not brave. They reconcile, Dona Maria writes a “brave” letter to her daughter, and it is on their return that they die in the collapse.

The next character is Esteban, twin brother of Manuel. The two grew up in the orphanage and became scribes, writing for, among others, Camilla Perichole, a famous and rather vain actress. Manuel dies of an infection, and Esteban, grief stricken despairs of life, attempting suicide, prevented by the captain who wants to take him to sea to restore him. Esteban wants to make a present of the pay advanced to him to Madre Maria de Pilar and dies on the bridge enroute to the orphanage.

The final two are Uncle Pio, who had mentored Camilla Perichole, helping her to achieve fame, and Perichole’s son Jaime. When small pox disfigures her, her career is ended. Uncle Pio sees her one night and she refuses to see him again but agrees to let him mentor her son. Uncle Pio and Jaime are on the way to Lima when the bridge collapses.

The final chapter describes the completion of Brother Juniper’s book in which he even tries formulas that he applies to each life, to no avail. This all ends badly for Juniper who is declared a heretic, punishable by death.

The account of their lives, in very formal language, brings no conclusion, just facts of people with their loves, longings, loneliness, petty, and noble acts. It’s simply, this is the story of their lives…and then they died on the bridge. The closest Wilder gets in the novel to making sense of it all is at the funeral in the famous, oft-quoted closing line spoken by Abbess Madre Maria de Pilar: “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 cannot decide whether this is a beautiful or a trite thought. I suspect some find comfort in keeping their dead alive in loving memory which connects them to the loved ones they’ve lost. I have those memories, particularly of father and mother and dear friends who have died, but also the apprehension of the yawning void that separates us that love may bridge in thought but not reality. I’m not sure we ever find “meaning” in the death of anyone, even if they die in some cause. I wonder instead, and this reflects my Christian convictions, if what we may talk about is hope, the belief that they, and we, will “rise in glory” after resting in peace. It doesn’t offer a “meaning” to death, which may faith tells me is the “last enemy” but it consoles in loss and grief. show less

“On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” And so begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which is a small masterpiece. Wilder’s prose is beautiful and he creates great character sketches in a work that is all framed to consider the question “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?” He applies just the right touch artistically for so weighty a subject, and in the end, as in life, the “answer” is really up to the reader. Highly recommended.

Some fun facts: Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and graduated from Berkeley High School. The book launched him to immediate worldwide fame; his teaching salary show more at the time was $3,000 and the book made him $87,000 in 1928 alone, which is about a million dollars in today’s currency. Lastly, David Mitchell fans will recall the character Luisa Rey, named as an homage to this work, as well as perhaps recall the epigraph to Ghostwritten, taken from the end of the first chapter:
“And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring?
Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like 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.”

A couple of other quotes that I loved:
On literature:
“…the Conde delighted in her letters, but he thought that when he had enjoyed the style he had extracted all their richness and intention, missing (as most readers do) the whole purport of literature, which is the notation of the heart.”

And this one on love, which I found that Tony Blair used in a memorial service for British victims of 9/11:
“But soon we shall die and all memories 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 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." show less

Det er yderst sjældent, jeg støder på bøger, der så ømt, så elegant, så poetisk og så smukt formår at beskrive kærligheden i al dens skrøbelighed, selvmodsigelse, styrke og smerte.

Thornton Wilder’s 1927 masterpiece is a contemplative and delicately mournful work, brilliant in the simple power of its prose. Battling with God, fate, or destiny- particularly the God of the Catholic faith – is a facet that has preoccupied many authors, including Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, and Wilder brings his own unique vision to that individual struggle, viewing it with a mixture of bitterness and faith. He approaches it through the lens of a very human but very haunting question: Why did those people – those people in particular – die? So often throughout the novel it seems that someone else should have died – the close friend or relative or mentor of one of those who fell to their deaths, rather than the actual show more victim. Each of them – a brilliantly intellectual but half-mad matriarch, an intelligent, lonely orphan, a sailor with nothing left to live for, and a old, multi-talented man with the crippled son of a great actress in tow – has reached some sort of turning point in their lives, and is going to make a new beginning. Why then should they die? The book does not provide an answer – not in that way. Rather, Wilder’s answer to death, and perhaps in a way to the sacrifices exacted by death or God or whatever he considers the dominant force – is love. “Love...the only meaning.”

The characters are brilliantly drawn and sketched, particularly The Marquesa de Montemayor, a woman risen from peasant stock to become a noblewoman, but whose life is wasted in hungry, desperate longings for a daughter who despises her. From this hunger springs a series of brilliantly witty and profound letters which will be the wonder of every generation after her, while in between the writing of them the Marquesa plunges into drunkenness with the regularity of clockwork. Uncle Pio, similarly, a man born with a knack for life and success and the even rarer knack of loving beauty and talent without hungering for the woman who possesses them, is a character who burns with originality and pathos. These two, along with Esteban, the twin, are the three around whom the book is centered, while the two younger, Pepita and Jaime, act as supplements to them among the quintet of victims. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a hauntingly beautiful exploration into the meaning of life and of death, full of tenderness and subtle ironies, and reminiscent of both Brideshead Revisited and The Bridges of Madison County. Not a book to be missed. show less