The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Is Falling Down, Falling Down, Falling Down...

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Author: Thornton Wilder

Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world. –Narrator

Here the Perichole would fling her face and arms upon the tables…, caught up into a trembling fit of weeping. Only perfection would do, only perfection. And that had never come. –Narrator

But soon we shall die and all memory 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. –Abbess

Book jacket description:

“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, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and 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 the author’s timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.

Every time this book is mentioned online, it is surrounded by glowing praises. That’s the reason I chose it for my list. And while I agree that the language Wilder used throughout was poetic, and the interconnectedness of his five subjects was well-thought out and beautifully unfolded, I didn’t find the work as brilliant as I was supposed to have found it. Granted, I’m no expert and have no great authority, but I found it only ‘good’ and not ‘the best thing ever written.’

The story is broken up into five parts – not one for each of the deceased, like I initially thought. No, only parts 2, 3 and 4 discuss the people involved in the accident. At first I thought this was maybe a copout… doesn’t each person deserve his or her own section? But the more I thought about it, the more it really made sense… if you’re traveling on a journey, you’re often not alone. So why should each character be alone on his or her passage across the bridge? And even though the five people were broken up among three sections, not a one of them was crossing alone.

In Part Two (Part One was the setup, titled “Perhaps an Accident”), the Marquesa de Montemayor and her companion Pepita are returning from a pilgrimage to a saint’s shrine. And, as is typical before a literary death, one of the characters – the Marquesa – has just had an epiphany about her life, and the other – Pepita – has just learned she is going home to the convent, after having been sent away. And on that happy note, they fall to their deaths.

Similarly, in Part Three, Esteban is traveling with his new employer Captain Alvarez. Fortunately for the Captain, he had to ferry a boat across the river to carry all of his supplies. So while the section is only about Esteban’s death, even he isn’t really traveling alone. And also similar to Part Two, it is an inopportune time for Esteban to die, as he has just purchased a gift to give to his beloved Abbess, who raised him. Instead, he dies.

Finally, Section Four deals with Uncle Pio and Don Jaime. They were traveling back home so that Don Jaime could undergo theatrical and musical training from Pio, who – rumor had it – was his grandfather. They were about to usher in a new era, as Uncle Pio would once again be grooming someone for the spotlight, as he once did for Don Jaime’s mother, Camila Perichole. Their deaths came at the time of their new beginnings and fresh hopes.

Each death happened in the prime of a life, when the victim of the tragedy had just made or was on the verge of making a life change. And while that seems… unjust, it’s almost poetic justice that each person who died had made a decision to alter the way he or she was living. They were taking metaphorical steps to better their lives in one way or another, and instead their physical steps led to their deaths.

The two women who were intertwined in each of these people’s lives, the Abbess of the Convent of Santa Maria Rosa de la Rosas and the great performer Camila Perichole, both live. The Abbess loses her prodigy in Pepita and her favorite charge and scribe in Esteban; Camila Perichole loses her valet, “her singing-master, her coiffeur, her masseur, her reader, her errand-boy, her banker; rumor added: her father” in Pio and her favorite son in Don Jaime. And both women lose a matron and acquaintance in the Marquesa. Wilder weaves other minor characters into the lives of the victims, as well, but none so prominently as these two women.

And now I’m re-evaluating my stance on whether this book deserves all the praise it received… the way that Wilder interweaves the major and minor characters while simultaneously outlining the lives and future hopes of each of his victims all in less than 200 pages is, simply put, genius.

My takeaway: There is a time and a reason for every life and for every death, though we may never fully understand any of it. And, if given the option in Peru to take a footbridge or a ferry, take the ferry!