Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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128 of 134 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning, September 28, 2002
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.
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39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What Does it Mean?, June 8, 2002
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...
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.", April 18, 2007
Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize winning novel takes on the daunting task of exploring whether or not there is a plan behind why we live and die - and how. The debate rages around the incident of the Bridge of San Luis Rey snapping one day, sending five people plummeting to their deaths. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan missionary, witnesses the tragedy and determines to make it the test case in an experiment he has long sought to complete: to prove that the victims were either impious and therefore punished or pious and therefore being whisked away to Heaven to stand beside God. It is a radical study in his time, and its inherent questioning into the nature of the world will ultimately see Brother Juniper mislabeled as a heretic by the church.
The character studies that make up the bulk of the novel (which is really more of a novella given its brevity) are uniformly intriguing, and it is there that "Bridge" truly shines, in addition to Wilder's superb use of language. His portrait of the Marquesa, her servant Pepita, Esteban and his twin brother Manuel, and the Perichole are awe-inspiring glimpses into lives that feel full and true to life - an even greater achievement considering the short amount of time Wilder spends on each of them in order to move the plot forward. If it is more difficult to get a handle on other characters like the Archbishop, the viceroy, Jaime, and the enigmatic Uncle Pio we can forgive Wilder because they still fit the larger scheme of the novel and add to its compelling plot. What emerges from their intertwining lives is the realization that human lives are often too complex to be accurately affixed with such extreme labels as `good' or `bad'. Each has marks for them and against them, making an experiment like Brother Juniper's impossible to complete. There are too many shades of grey to see things as black and white as the missionary would like them to be.
In addition to this main theme, Wilder expertly weaves in questions regarding love, family, and faith. And while I greatly appreciate his refusal to come to any definite answer, one does wish that Wilder had put more into his presentation. In his exploration of this tragic event and its implications he does little more than present evidence for the reader to interpret as they see fit, and the problem there is that they will come away with whatever preconceived notions they may have had regarding the subject perfectly intact. Wilder brings no new insights to the central question and he makes no poignant arguments for either side. "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" is, then, essentially a test case for the reader to apply their own theories to. There will be no earth-shattering revelations to make them reconsider their position, and as good as the novel is in all other respects, I wish that the debate as Wilder presented it had more meat. It certainly isn't lacking in substance, but just a touch more flavor would have been greatly appreciated.
Still, I would highly recommend this book to any lover of literature and anyone who is trying to find their own answers to the question it poses. Wilder's novel takes on additional significance in the wake of 9/11 that makes it even more relevant to modern readers. To read that "The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break" is to revisit the stunned disbelief that has permeated the years since that tragedy.
Grade: B+
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