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Literary Review - “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”
by Thornton Wilder

“On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.”

Front cover

With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder opens The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements of American fiction.

Brother Juniper, a humble Italian Franciscan monk witnesses the tragedy, and then - thinking “that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences” - embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of these particular individuals. He senses God's hand in the bridge's collapse and commits himself to learning about the lives of the five victims in a search for God's plan.

The next one hundred pages of this 120-page novel tell us of the lives of three of the victims in a smooth, polished prose. Each of these portraits of eighteenth century Limeños focuses on tender, loving and life-long relationships - the aristocratic Doña María the Marquesa de Montemayor and her companion Pepita; Esteban and his twin bother Manuel; and Uncle Pio and his devotion to the actress Camila - that brought meaning into their lives.

Brother Juniper's theological efforts come to naught in this last chapter, and he dies unfulfilled. But Thornton Wilder permits the reader see what Juniper never saw. In the book's final chapter, the Abbess whose orphanage was home to two of the victims, while reflecting on their deaths, realizes that the meaning lies in the lives themselves and the love the victims were able to share while they were alive. The book's closing sentence then tells us that “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 short, brilliant and profoundly beautiful Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was originally published in 1927 and was out of print for many years. A new edition was published in 2003 by Perennial publishers, however, that we can easily purchase in Peru over the internet. It features unpublished notes for the novel and other documentary material in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder. -- JR

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