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    The Bridge of San Luis Rey: A Novel
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    The Bridge of San Luis Rey: A Novel
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    The Bridge of San Luis Rey: A Novel
    Ebook180 pages3 hours

    The Bridge of San Luis Rey: A Novel

    By Thornton Wilder

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    About this ebook

    “The essence of Mr. Wilder’s book is really the feeling in it; it is a ‘notation of the heart’ with sympathy. Gaily or sadly, but always with understanding, a belief in the miracle of love runs through it all.” --Times Literary Supplement (London)

    "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, one of the towering achievements in American fiction, and a novel beloved throughout the world.

    By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death—and to Wilder’s timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.

    This edition includes a foreword by acclaimed author Russell Banks and features previously unpublished notes and other illuminating documentary material about the novel and author.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 25, 2014
    ISBN9780062232724
    Author

    Thornton Wilder

    Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works, exploring the connection between the commonplace and cosmic dimensions of human experience, continue to be read and produced around the world. His Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, as did two of his four full-length dramas, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). Wilder's The Matchmaker was adapted as the musical Hello, Dolly!. He also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them teaching, acting, the opera, and films. (His screenplay for Hitchcock's Shadow of Doubt [1943] remains a classic psycho-thriller to this day.) Wilder's many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee's Medal for Literature.

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    Reviews for The Bridge of San Luis Rey

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    • 4/5
      Well-written, of course, and readable with traces of the satire that he would use in later works, but (for me) unconvincing in its final lines and world view.
    • 4/5
      The premise for The Bridge of San Luis Rey is fascinating. In a nutshell an Italian monk by the name of Brother Juniper was not only witness to a terrible tragedy, he was mere moments away from sharing the same horrific fate. An ancient bridge in Lima, Peru collapses just as five travelers have set out across it. Instead of suffering a kind of survivors guilt, Brother Juniper is instead encouraged to pursue his study of theology, using the tragedy to demonstrate scientific reason as to why his life was spared. Being a man of the cloth he wants to prove it was divine intervention that caused him to avoid such an unfortunate demise. More importantly, he can finally prove the five victims who weren't so lucky shared a common fault and their deaths were part of a larger plan. The other option, less likely in the eyes of Brother Juniper, was it was a simple, random accident. Brother Juniper devotes his life to researching the private lives and documenting the secrets of the five victims, in a search for commonality. All in the hopes of proving the collapse was considered an act of god, a shared destiny. This would be something Brother Juniper could finally attach his scientific study of theology to.
    • 5/5
      Rating: A+Perhaps on of the best novels I've ever read. Brilliantly told. Wonderful character development. Many anticipated, but unexpected turns. Story will stay with me a long while.
    • 5/5
      We all have a worldview (don't we?) that influences just about everything we encounter. Literature is no exception. In many of the reviews I've read of Thornton Wilder's outstanding The Bridge of San Luis Rey 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 is 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 is 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. No doubt, Brother Juniper found his answer. If not, I at least recognized mine.
    • 5/5
      Three intermingled stories of various Peruvians living in Lima during the Spanish colonial era, and dying by an act of God while crossing the famous Incan bridge. The story as a whole is an exercise in answering the question "Why? Why them?" Thornton Wilder's answer was simple, and well-loved (he got the Pulitzer, the book was a smash and unprecedented success and the proceeds from this one short book, written in his twenties, set him up for the rest of his life).By the way, the Foreword by Russell Banks is bad and I would advise avoiding it, but the Afterword by the author's granddaughter is very good, going into his letters, interviews and original drafts.
    • 5/5
      This was a fantastic book. I love books that pose big questions, and the question posed in this book is one of the biggest. Having lost friends to accidents and to suicide, it's a question that has gone through my mind repeatedly - why them? What does it mean? While Wilder does not exactly answer the question (he leaves it for the reader to decide), he poses it brilliantly and beautifully. This is a book that really gets you thinking, which is how all great books should be.
    • 4/5
      The story begins with the collapse of an old Incan rope bridge over a canyon in Peru. Five people die, one person witnesses the event. That one person is Brother Juniper, a friar. Brother Juniper decides that there must be a reason that each person was on this particular bridge at this particular time, which must have been destined as the time for each of their deaths, and sets out to probe all possible nooks and crannies of their lives to determine what that reason might be. The Bridge of San Luis Rey reads almost like a parable. Brother Juniper examines each life lost on the Bridge for any signs that would give good reason for that individual to be removed from this earth at that time. I won't go into the details of the lives so as not to give away exactly who dies, but it is true that each of the lives are connected to the others in some way. There is one woman who connects them all and, ironically, her life is not taken. The question Brother Juniper seeks to answer is an age-old question that inevitably appears when tragedy strikes. "Why?" Was that person just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Is there a "destiny" on each of our lives that determines precisely when we will die? Why does it appear so unfair when the seemingly undeserving suffer? I believe that we often just have to place our trust in God at such times, knowing that we won't always have answers. Thornton's book is very short (I think I read it in 3 hours) and easy to read. I recommend you read it to see what you think about his conclusions on why tragedies might inexplicably strike.
    • 4/5
      It was a really interesting premise but it didn't actually go anywhere. I was disappointed that there was no analysis by the monk at the end, which seemed to be the original point. More detail on the reception to the study would have deepened it as well. The character sketches were still very well done. And it's weird how much of my reading lately references the same classical Spanish poets and playwrights.
    • 5/5
      I am certainly not the first, nor will I be the last, to recognize the brilliance of this novella. This is my first Thornton Wilder read.....how I could have made it this far in life without reading his work is beyond me. Somehow he manages to create vivid and memorable characters who share the experience of dying when a bridge collapses. From that event he proceeds to ask profound and essentially unanswerable questions, of the sort we all try to address or avoid throughout our life. Is there intention? Is there meaning? When is it the right time for as person to die? Is there such a thing or is it all happenstance? The introduction for this 75th anniversary edition of the novel by Russell Banks is excellent. He draws a parallel between the experience of those surviving the bridge collapse to those surviving the 9/11 attacks. The same eternal questions apply. Lovely, powerful prose makes this so very readable and timeless!
    • 3/5
      "The finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below"By sally tarbox on 26 February 2018Format: Kindle EditionIn 1714 Peru, a bridge gives way, killing the five random individuals on it; an old noblewoman, ugly, derided by many, and abandoned by her lovely but cold-hearted daughter; the orphan girl attending her; a depressed young man who has lost his twin brother; an elderly man who 'manages' a celebrated actress; and the young son of said lady, whom he's taking to educate.After the event, a local priest tries to investigate the lives of the victims in a bid to prove a logic to this 'act of God'. While the abbess who knew the dead sees the effect of the tragedy on those left behind and their resultant actions, commenting "there is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."This is a well-written work as Wilder delineates the complex characters of the protagonists. I didn't find it massively engaging as a read, but recognise the literary merit and philosophical debate.
    • 3/5
      It was a good short read, about relationships. A book that was a morality tale sort of. Not sure why it was on the list for the 200 best books from the Modern Library. But at least it was short, and to the point, and did not meander through the valley.
    • 4/5
      A bridge in Peru collapses, sending five people plummeting to their deaths. Brother Juniper is determined to show that this is no random chance, and sets out to write the definitive book proving that this is all part of a plan. The unnamed narrator of this book lays out the facts as well, giving us interlocking stories of the people who were on the bridge that fateful day.Was it fate or was it chance? Who were these five people on the bridge, and what brought them to that place on that day in 1714 when the bridge collapsed? Though it's a short book, it manages to pack in quite a lot about these characters and their connections, and leave you with much food for thought. I was much more familiar with Thornton Wilder as a playwright and author of Our Town, but one of my co-workers happened to be reading this for her book club this month. I was in the mood for something a little more challenging that what I'd been reading lately, so I picked it up. I'm glad I did.
    • 3/5
      “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 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.I've had The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder on my to-read list for probably twenty years. I had vaguely heard of it growing up, but it really crossed my radar when the local Catholic high school suggested it as a book to teach in junior high. I considered it whenever it came time to evaluate the novels I taught in eighth grade, but it somehow never grabbed me enough to read it, much less teach it. That's one of the main reasons I put it on my Classics Challenge list: to see if it's a good novel to teach to eighth graders.The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1928, and was selected for Time's All-time 100 Novels List and the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels (The Board's List).Here's a summary of the plot from 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 presents several deep and important questions, but does not answer them. Nor is it meant to. In a letter included in the The Harper Perennial Kindle edition, Wilder answers a student who had written to ask about his position on the book's questions:Dear John:The book is not supposed to solve. A vague comfort is supposed to hover above the unanswered questions, but it is not a theorem with its Q.E.D. The book is supposed to be as puzzling and distressing as the news that five of your friends died in an automobile accident. I dare not claim that all sudden deaths are, in the last counting, triumphant. As you say, a little over half the situations seem to prove something and the rest escape, or even contradict. Chekhov said: "The business of literature is not to answer questions, but to state them fairly."If Chekhov is right, then Wilder does good business in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It is as puzzling and distressing as Wilder intended, and it does not offer trite or shallow answers to deep questions.As to my question about whether it would be good to teach in junior high, I can only answer that it would not be a book that I would choose. It certainly has many of the qualities a piece of literature ought to have to make a good classroom novel: well-drawn characters, thought-provoking subject matter, depth of meaning, and so on. It deserves to be on a list of books to be taught in junior high. However, it didn't move me the way a book needs to in order to be passionate about teaching it.
    • 3/5
      Not sure i got this one......Pulitzer Prize???? Really???? I even had the special Reader's Enrichment Series editionand read the quasi-Cliff's Notes in the back, and i still did not get it. Modestly interesting at best..sort of a several degrees of separation story in reverse stepping back to follow the lives of several different people as they head towards a tragic event that ended all of their lives. Lots of troubled souls wading through the socially stratified Lima, Peru of the early 1700's. Lots of references to the relationship between Peru and Spain, lots of references to 17th Century Spanish literature and Catholic beliefs that i had no connection with whatsoever, and therefore felt somewhat left behind. Maybe 1927 was a weak year in Literature.....or maybe I just am a little too simple.....Basically, I would not recommend this to any other than rabid bookies that need to read all the prize-winners, just because.....sorry.
    • 2/5
      Didn't know what to expect of this book - quite a good reflection on why people die when they do
    • 3/5
      A wooden suspension bridge in Peru breaks and 5 people fall to their death. With sudden death comes a look back at the victim and their relationships. Written in 1927 its voice is flowery and religious, and being sited in Peru two centuries ago, the Spanish inflection is not always understandable. Not at all what I was expecting.
    • 4/5
      Simple yet divine.
    • 5/5
      A beautiful, elegiac discourse on the nature of love and life. Rarely do I read such moving literature. The prose boarders on poetic. I would highly recommend this. It's a quick read, but deserves carful contemplation.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      A beautiful short novel of love and its many facets. This isn't a story of romantic love, but of the different kinds of love that family and friends share. Love of the heart for people that encompasses the good and bad.
    • 4/5
      An ancient bridge outside of Lima, Peru collapses and five people fall to their deaths. Was this just a random accident or was it the fulfillment of God’s plans for those unfortunate victims? Brother Juniper, a Franciscan monk who should have been on the bridge and witnessed the collapse, devotes the next several years of his life to addressing that question. He delves into the histories of the victims and compiles a voluminous account of his findings, which is viewed as an act of heresy by some Church elders. Despite Brother Juniper’s efforts, there are no easy answers to be found in this slim, thought-provoking book. Certainly, there is no clear indication that Divine Intervention was responsible for the tragic incident, nor can we be sure that it was the result of pure chance. Readers must draw their own conclusions and there is no shortage of modern comparisons on which to reflect (e.g., 9/11, Japanese tsunami, Chilean earthquake).I grew up thinking of Thornton Wilder as more of a playwright than a novelist; “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” was actually the first of his books that I read. What I think now is that Wilder was simply a splendid writer, regardless of his chosen form. This is a book that can be read quite quickly, but its images and the questions it poses will take you far longer to fully digest.
    • 4/5
      This is a short book about the separate lives of five people who are killed in an accident when a bridge in 1714 Peru breaks. A Catholic monk just barely avoids being amongst the five, and decides to attempt investigating the reason for their deaths. Why did he arrive a few moments later? Why those five people in particular? Was it coincidence, or divine intervention?His search leads him to look into each of their lives, and "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" chronicles their both commonplace and extraordinary events, each chapter about the five people ending in what led them to traveling over the bridge that day, and ultimately their deaths.This simply written, concise little story is to the point yet still eloquent and subtly poetic. Highly insightful, sensitive, and inquisitively philosophical.I liked this book that searched the topic of death in a meaningful, unique manner.A good book - 4 stars.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. It is a set of short stories linked together by a framing narrative- a bridge collapses and several people are killed, and each story tells the story of one of the people who died in that event. The writing is lovely, and some of the imagery is hauntingly memorable.
    • 5/5
      "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below."The goal of this book, or at least a character in it, is to find out whether we live by accident or by plan. I don't think the author answers this question, or intended to. He leaves it up to the reader to determine through the recounting of the lives of the characters whether their lives had a plan or not. It is similar to The Life of Pi, in that your answer will depend on how you view the world. I liked this book. It was very satisfactory.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Thornton Wilder successfully fictionalized some ages-old core questions that have haunted humanity since its inception in his short novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Why do bad things happen? Why do bad things happen to good people? Is there a plan or purpose behind the bad happenings? A reason? Are bad happenings 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 or war, "acts of God" or acts of fate? Are bad happenings meaningful or meaningless? If the events in Wilder's novel are not "acts of God" does that then mean that the deaths served no purpose and the victim's lives had no meaning, or could the disaster, in it's aftermath, somehow, be it by God or by other mysterious forces, be used for good in the lives of those left grieving, behind? Complicated, convoluted questions, this slim, but intense, beautifully written novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, raises.Wilder, of course, doesn't explicitly answer these universal questions, though by novel's end, our narrator, Brother Juniper, eyewitness to the bridges collapse: "He saw the bridge divide and fling five gesticulating ants into the valley below..." certainly has answered some of them. Though in some socks-you-in-the-gut, harsh 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 the deeper questions of why that are only natural for an inquisitive mind's pursuit, ultimately becomes the sixth and final victim of San Luis Rey's collapse. Brother Juniper lacked the foresight in seeing 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, Brother Juniper was stealing time from his ascetic commitments to solitude and prayer in order to play detective. In the least he was egregiously undisciplined; at worst, a heretic. But his fellow monks got it wrong. Because Brother Juniper sought in his investigations not to disprove his Catholic faith or the sovereignty of God, but to affirm his faith in God. Not surprisingly, Brother Juniper's rational, rather than preprogrammed-faith approach, in attempting to determine why those five perished when and where and how they perished, was condemned as insubordination and blasphemy, an unforgivable rejection of God's goodness and sovereignty. How dare a middling monk not take God automatically on faith! For the sin of suggesting God's will could be accessed through an investigation -- through empiricism -- Brother Juniper, a devout and faithful Catholic, became a martyr for science.If there are any answers in this brutal universe that can explain how Evil and Human Suffering can comfortably coexist alongside a purported All-Good and Omnipotent God, a deity to be trusted and praised by its adherents even when disasters on a scale more monstrous than the collapse of a flimsy bridge in Peru occur ... say the collapse of the Twin Towers or the unending collapse that is Genocide ... then it's clear to me that Brother Juniper was successful in his quest.
    • 5/5
      In Thornton Wilder’s classic novel a disaster is the catalyst for an examination of the lives lost. “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.”Thornton goes on to create rich and insightful histories and stories for the victims. He writes about love, jealousy, hate and a large range of emotions and circumstances. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is still very relevant and readable.
    • 4/5
      Just a couple of quick comments. I think I was supposed to read this in high school but somehow didn't. Maybe I read the Cliffs Notes. Anyway, I'm sort of glad I waited until now to read this lovely book. It's hard for me to believe Thornton Wilder was only 30 when he published this. It is an amazing novel - very short, very precise and exactly right. A group of people could spend days discussing the implications of the bridge disaster as compared to 9/11 or even the personal tragedies we all suffer. How does it feel to be left behind? Why were these 5 the ones to fall from the bridge? So many questions.
    • 2/5
      MehSure, 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.
    • 5/5
      This was a fantastic book. I love books that pose big questions, and the question posed in this book is one of the biggest. Having lost friends to accidents and to suicide, it's a question that has gone through my mind repeatedly - why them? What does it mean? While Wilder does not exactly answer the question (he leaves it for the reader to decide), he poses it brilliantly and beautifully. This is a book that really gets you thinking, which is how all great books should be.