The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)

~ Thornton Wilder (Author) "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below..." (more)
Key Phrases: Doña Maria, Brother Juniper, Doña Clara (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Thornton Wilder, published in 1927. Wilder's career was established with this book, in which he first made use of historical subject matter as a background for his interwoven themes of the search for justice, the possibility of altruism, and the role of Christianity in human relationships. The plot centers on five travelers in 18th-century Peru who are killed when a bridge across a canyon collapses; a priest interprets the story of each victim in an attempt to explain the workings of divine providence. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

This beautiful new edition features unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary mate- rial, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.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

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics; 3rd printing edition (April 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060088877
• ISBN-13: 978-0060088873
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (95 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #72,845 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

132 of 139 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, September 28, 2002

By	richard_t "richard_t" (Overseas) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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This review is from: The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)

A brilliant book. Wilder richly deserved the Pulitzer that this book earned. Short, at 133 pages in this edition, it is uniformly excellent. Wilder's sharp wit and turn of phrase are unmatched. The book's theme is powerful and resolved in an unexpected and profound way. Brother Juniper, a thoughtful friar, witnesses the collapse of a rope bridge over a gorge in rural Peru in 1714 and the death of the five people walking along it. He views this event as an opportunity to prove the existence of god and, finally, to elevate theology to the rank of the hard sciences. Juniper instinctively believes that there must be a divine reason for those five to have been chosen for death. He senses god's powerful, latent hand in the bridge's collapse and commits himself to learning all there is to know about the victims in order to discern the plan and prove god's existence. Who were the victims? What were their lives like? Why did they die?

Juniper's conclusions are, of course, inconclusive. He never found the pattern, but remained convinced that it was there, just that he was too poor an intellect to see it. Such questions, naturally, were anathema to the church of the age and Juniper and his book were destroyed for heresy. Readers who focus on the same questions as Juniper are doomed to be just as frustrated. Wilder is far too insightful to let Juniper have the last word, for ultimately, it is not Juniper who stumbles upon the meaning of the five deaths, but the survivors -those who loved the victims- as well as the reader. What the five had in common was that they were human beings, with tender sides and flaws and significant unrequited loves. There is nothing remarkable here, we are all built that way. After their deaths, the Abbess whose orphanage was home to two of the victims realizes that the meaning lies in the lives themselves, in the love the victims shared with those near to them. That there is no immortality, not even memory or good works, so that what matters is the fleeting existence of goodness, and therein lies god's grace. Love is a powerful and immediate force, not a point for theological debate. "Many who have spent a lifetime in passion can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday."

Wilder's prose is smooth and polished and yielding of aphorisms: the six attributes of the adventurer (a memory for names and faces, the gift of tongues, inexhaustible invention, secrecy, a talent for chatting with strangers, and a freedom from conscience); or an observation that "the public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth." Every line is adept, every page a wonder.

While Wilder wrote the book in 1927, it is perhaps a perfect inquiry into 17th century baroque worldviews and the rationalist philosophies they spawned. The baroque had reached Spain, if not Peru, by 1714. Its fascination with death and the brevity of life ("carpe diem" and countless reminders of the inevitabiity of death) resound her, as do its emphasis on vanity, and theater as a metaphor for life. Lima's theatre, its actresses and audiences, are central to the book. And it is only when the beautiful actress is struck by tragedies that she reaches her resolution in grace. Juniper himself embodies that strange blend of baroque scientific materialism and divine idealism of an age in which Descartes could prove the existence of god while Newton demonstrated god's machinery in motion.

Wilder's solution is much more satisfying than Descartes' or Juniper's. Wilder may have been baroque in his cynicism, but he was decidedly 20th century american in his hopefulness. "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" is a stunning book.

40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What Does it Mean?, June 8, 2002

By	Elderbear (Loma Linda, Aztlan) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)

A short, sweet novel. Greater minds than mine awarded it a Pulitzer Prize, so I won't blabber on about its quality. Wilder wastes few words, inserts no extra padding, to tell his story. This lacks the action sequences and suspense of Tom Clancyish pulp, but does sneak up on the intellect, leaving the reader expectantly looking for the subtle connections that weave the characters together.

The manifest story is simple. Five people have fallen to their death in Peru, and Brother Juniper seeks to prove the goodness of God by evaluating their lives to demonstrate exactly why bad things happen. Gently satirical, Wilder consigns poor Brother Juniper to a fitting end, for the chutzpah of attempting to decipher the mind of God with a moral calculus. Juniper has forgotten his Master's admonition, to "judge not." Hidden from Juniper's attempt to make sense of tragedy lay connections that he could never imagine, longings, love unrequited, and loneliness unimaginable. In the end, we learn, not WHY bad things happen, but the power and beauty that can rise from the ashes of tragedy.

Wilder tells snippets of stories, weaving lives together, in a way that goes unnoticed at first, then becomes subliminal, and finally explodes into consciousness at the end. While these lives and their interconnections are somewhat contrived, they effect a transformation, both of the story-line and the reader by the end of the book. Well worth reading a second time.<P...

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Divine Little Literary Gem, January 6, 2000

By	Erika M. Vause (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)

I was shocked to see that the average of the book reviews for this work was only a 4 stars. This is among the finest books I have ever read--somewhat comparative to Steinbeck's The Pearl and Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea in its brevity, lyricism, seeming simplicity and actual depth of both feeling and philosophy. The rhythmic beauty of Wilder's poetic prose would quite literally take my breath away at points and the story, with its intense sympathy for all mortal strivings and failings, touched me so deeply that I cry and laugh even in remembrance of many of the parts. I don't think there was a character in the book whom I didn't feel deeply empathetic with. The extended metaphor of the bridge which links fate and accident, love and loneliness, life and death was so flawlessly, yet subtly, present throughout that I am continually held in awe at the author's genius. More than anything though, the theme of the transcendence of the loneliness of mortality through love continues to affect my personal life every day.