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3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
This is the sort of melodramatic, sentimental storytelling with twists of irony and musings on The Meaning of Life that flourished in the early 20th century and has fallen out of fashion. I was hoping for Rashomon but got O. Henry.
challenging
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Elegant writing and a rich vocabulary tell the story of everyday people living centuries ago. "Our Town" I among my favorite pieces of literature. This work is also beautiful and accessible. It is not as avian-grade as some of Wilder's other works.
I read this decades ago. I have found this book seems to be either a love it or hate it, which I find very interesting. I simply hated it at the time and don’t think I will ever give it another chance. But you may find you are one of the “loved it!” readers. Why not try it?
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below is the celebrated opening of this 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Brother Juniper a Franciscan monk witnesses the tragedy and contemplates why were these 5 souls vs. another 5 souls doomed. He decides to investigate their lives and determine the divine reason for this tragedy-at one point devising a grading system for people ranking goodness, piety, and usefulness.
Wilder who received a Masters in French from Princeton openly admitted that the first character the Friar investigated- the Marquesa de Montemayor was based on Madame de Sevigne-famous for her letters to her daughter which along with several other of Thornton Wilder's works is now next on my reading list. The Friar’s investigations take approximately 6 years and during that period the Marquesa’s letters to her daughter are published and become a cause celebre.
The five victims include the Marquesa, her companion, a scribe whose is a twin, a friend/mentor of The Perichole and The Perichole’s son. The investigations act as flashbacks and as the reader you learn the history of each of the 5 victims and how their stories are intertwined whether through the Abbess or the celebrated Actress The Perichole.
One of the reasons I loved the Bridge of San Luis Rey is that Wilder does not answer the question of why but allows the reader to contemplate all of the moral ambiguity in tragedy. He allows you to be the arbiter on the "correctness" of each individual's fate including the Friar and he does this in a writing style that is clear and direct.
Wilder who received a Masters in French from Princeton openly admitted that the first character the Friar investigated- the Marquesa de Montemayor was based on Madame de Sevigne-famous for her letters to her daughter which along with several other of Thornton Wilder's works is now next on my reading list. The Friar’s investigations take approximately 6 years and during that period the Marquesa’s letters to her daughter are published and become a cause celebre.
The five victims include the Marquesa, her companion, a scribe whose is a twin, a friend/mentor of The Perichole and The Perichole’s son. The investigations act as flashbacks and as the reader you learn the history of each of the 5 victims and how their stories are intertwined whether through the Abbess or the celebrated Actress The Perichole.
One of the reasons I loved the Bridge of San Luis Rey is that Wilder does not answer the question of why but allows the reader to contemplate all of the moral ambiguity in tragedy. He allows you to be the arbiter on the "correctness" of each individual's fate including the Friar and he does this in a writing style that is clear and direct.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I really did not understand what the stories had to do with the intended goal. Even if it was simply to show the lives before the bridge incident, I never felt it was effectively drawn back to that.
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
This is a death story. On the plot level, it’s the story of five Peruvians who fall to their deaths when a once-sturdy titular bridge—the titular bridge—collapses. But more than that, it’s a story about the death of God. Written in the twentieth-century United States, the tale is set in eighteenth-century Peru. The timing, I suspect, is deliberate. For it was in the eighteenth century that intellectuals famously began to interrogate the moral meaning of— well, what we now call “freak accidents”; what used to be called, and in an antiquated legal context still are called, “acts of God.” In Candide (1759), Voltaire mocked his society’s moralizing response to the Great Lisbon Earthquake. Through Pangloss’ relentless optimism in the face suffering and injustice, we are meant to conclude that it is both absurd and offensive to imagine that the quake was a punishment from God. Wilder, who wrote this novel as “a friendly argument with his Calvinist father,” shares Voltaire’s skepticism of traditional theodicy.
The main narrative, a recounting of the lives of the deceased, is framed by two attempts to make meaning of the bridge’s collapse. The first is undertaken by a Franciscan monk, Brother Juniper. Juniper, an ersatz philosophe, wishes to prove, “scientifically,” that the five deserved to die. So he goes about interviewing everyone who knew them, painstakingly filling in a ledger of deeds good and bad, filling out a character sheet composed of traits Goodness, Piety, and Usefulness. Years of effort are ultimately wasted. The Church hierarchy disapproves his final product and he is burned at the stake. As the flames lick his body, he hastily fills in his own ledger, wondering what he has done deserve death.
I read Juniper’s project as a bitter — if wickedly funny — caricature of Christianity, dipped in the anti-Catholic Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition, more than a genuine argument, friendly or otherwise, with it. The thing about theodicy is that it does not rest on moral philosophy so much as on a belief in the Theos. It is infinitely supple. Few Christians believe that only the bad die young. (In fact, the aphorism goes in the opposite direction.) There are reasons beyond punishment for God to take a person “early.” To a Christian, it is always “His timing,” entrusted to the mystery of the universe. Brother Juniper has the logic chain backwards. It is the assumption of a purposeful universe that makes the timing of life and death meaningful; there are no objective data to prove a death was meaningful or just, from which we might then deduce the existence of cosmic purpose.
Unable to accept either the Christian’s willingness to defer these questions to the next life or nihilism, one character—an Abbess, ironically—alights on a humanistic reconciliation with finitude, with which Wilder ends the novel. “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.”
I frequently heard Wilder’s play Our Town referenced in Latter-day Saint sermons growing up. So I was surprised to encounter an anguished atheist when I actually read him. (Perhaps he was carried away by the rhythm of his luminous phrase-making, but “the only survival, the only meaning” is so declarative I think my interpretation is correct.)
The older I get, and the further along in my own faith journey, the more I see this theme everywhere in literature. Perhaps those Latter-day Saint sermons were right and we are all wondering all the time, “Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where do I go after I die?” I hope we can begin to put religious and non-religious explorations of this topic in dialogue. They feel altogether bifurcated in American/Western culture. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is “literature” and as such “secular,” or safe for secular spaces, regardless of its metaphysical themes. It can be discussed in state schools, where students would hesitate to offer an overtly religious response. Meanwhile, private spaces denominated “Christian” are full of fear, loathing, and straw-manning of secular and humanist ways of reasoning about life. And so we Christians muddle on in a kind of double-consciousness, fluent in both traditions, unsure which one to own.
--
While the frame narrative is delightful and interesting, the meat of the novel lies betwixt. In telling the stories of these five people, Wilder tosses off countless pearls of wisdom. Wilder is simply American, and he wrote before the flowering of magical realism, yet his aphoristic, mellifluous style dovetails perfectly with that of Latin American fabulists like Borges and Garcia Marquez. His sentences are often precariously long, but always end up perfectly balanced.
The main narrative, a recounting of the lives of the deceased, is framed by two attempts to make meaning of the bridge’s collapse. The first is undertaken by a Franciscan monk, Brother Juniper. Juniper, an ersatz philosophe, wishes to prove, “scientifically,” that the five deserved to die. So he goes about interviewing everyone who knew them, painstakingly filling in a ledger of deeds good and bad, filling out a character sheet composed of traits Goodness, Piety, and Usefulness. Years of effort are ultimately wasted. The Church hierarchy disapproves his final product and he is burned at the stake. As the flames lick his body, he hastily fills in his own ledger, wondering what he has done deserve death.
I read Juniper’s project as a bitter — if wickedly funny — caricature of Christianity, dipped in the anti-Catholic Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition, more than a genuine argument, friendly or otherwise, with it. The thing about theodicy is that it does not rest on moral philosophy so much as on a belief in the Theos. It is infinitely supple. Few Christians believe that only the bad die young. (In fact, the aphorism goes in the opposite direction.) There are reasons beyond punishment for God to take a person “early.” To a Christian, it is always “His timing,” entrusted to the mystery of the universe. Brother Juniper has the logic chain backwards. It is the assumption of a purposeful universe that makes the timing of life and death meaningful; there are no objective data to prove a death was meaningful or just, from which we might then deduce the existence of cosmic purpose.
Unable to accept either the Christian’s willingness to defer these questions to the next life or nihilism, one character—an Abbess, ironically—alights on a humanistic reconciliation with finitude, with which Wilder ends the novel. “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.”
I frequently heard Wilder’s play Our Town referenced in Latter-day Saint sermons growing up. So I was surprised to encounter an anguished atheist when I actually read him. (Perhaps he was carried away by the rhythm of his luminous phrase-making, but “the only survival, the only meaning” is so declarative I think my interpretation is correct.)
The older I get, and the further along in my own faith journey, the more I see this theme everywhere in literature. Perhaps those Latter-day Saint sermons were right and we are all wondering all the time, “Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where do I go after I die?” I hope we can begin to put religious and non-religious explorations of this topic in dialogue. They feel altogether bifurcated in American/Western culture. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is “literature” and as such “secular,” or safe for secular spaces, regardless of its metaphysical themes. It can be discussed in state schools, where students would hesitate to offer an overtly religious response. Meanwhile, private spaces denominated “Christian” are full of fear, loathing, and straw-manning of secular and humanist ways of reasoning about life. And so we Christians muddle on in a kind of double-consciousness, fluent in both traditions, unsure which one to own.
--
While the frame narrative is delightful and interesting, the meat of the novel lies betwixt. In telling the stories of these five people, Wilder tosses off countless pearls of wisdom. Wilder is simply American, and he wrote before the flowering of magical realism, yet his aphoristic, mellifluous style dovetails perfectly with that of Latin American fabulists like Borges and Garcia Marquez. His sentences are often precariously long, but always end up perfectly balanced.
“Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a Pulitzer Prize winning short novel tackling the big religious and philosophical questions. The story follows the lives of five victims of the bridge collapse. The crash is witnessed by a monk, brother Jupiter, who in his own fear in the proximity of tragic fate that could easily befall him as well, embarks a civilization-old question; “Why did the tragedy occur to exactly this group of people?”. In searching for answers Jupiter wants to find the thread that connects victims' lives to the tragedy and explain this divine intervention. This is an ancient quest to find the meaning of suffering. Because the greatest pain is not the tragedy, but our incapability to find the meaning in it. Facing the absurd is more excruciating than facing the pain itself. In that sense, this novel made me reminiscent of [a:Camus's|957894|Albert Camus|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1606568448p2/957894.jpg] [b:The Plague|11989|The Plague|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1503362434l/11989._SY75_.jpg|2058116]. The character of monk Jupiter is similar to father Paneloux in trying to use an external religious system of belief to impose forced meaning to the senselessness of tragic fate, rejecting the absurd element of life and randomness by which suffering is imposed on young, as well as on old, on good, as well as on bad.
“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. And on that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons, that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of their taking off.“
Monk Jupiter is determined to subject the mystery of life and death to reason. For him, there are two options, there is a logically detectable system of explanation that is reachable through empirical observation, or there is no explanation at all, no meaning or greater plan of for life.
“It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences, and he had long intended putting it there. What he had lacked hitherto was a laboratory.”
Jupiter's quest unravels the stories of morally gray characters, full of flaws, but also full of imperfect and utterly human love and passion, complex real people that cannot be subjected to pure demise and punishment of sinners nor heavenly glory of saints. Both generous and selfish, cruel and merciful, innocent and sinful, the five characters are an archetypical representation of all of humanity; The Great Mother, The Orphan Girl, The Brother, The Teacher and The Beloved Son. Father Jupiter finds no answer at all, only unfinished life stories carried by flawed and somewhat self-serving love.
“The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.“
Life and death, as well as the complete meaning of suffering, will be not ever subjected and reached by human reason, and that is the quest that only leads to the death of characters that pursuit it, as we can see in brother Jupiter, father Paneloux ([b:The Plague|11989|The Plague|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1503362434l/11989._SY75_.jpg|2058116]) even Captain Ahab ([b:Moby-Dick or, the Whale|153747|Moby-Dick or, the Whale|Herman Melville|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327940656l/153747._SY75_.jpg|2409320]). Meaning, fate, love and hope cannot be empirically investigated, proven nor explained. One must be open to the indefinite mysteriousness of the world, and one cannot fool gods with his intellect and find a definite meaning of destiny.
In the famous finishing sentence Wilder detects love as the bridge of life and death and the only meaning, but at the same time throughout the novel shows that in this world, human love is always defective, never the same, and uniquely individual, just as our lives.
"Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well."
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a Pulitzer Prize winning short novel tackling the big religious and philosophical questions. The story follows the lives of five victims of the bridge collapse. The crash is witnessed by a monk, brother Jupiter, who in his own fear in the proximity of tragic fate that could easily befall him as well, embarks a civilization-old question; “Why did the tragedy occur to exactly this group of people?”. In searching for answers Jupiter wants to find the thread that connects victims' lives to the tragedy and explain this divine intervention. This is an ancient quest to find the meaning of suffering. Because the greatest pain is not the tragedy, but our incapability to find the meaning in it. Facing the absurd is more excruciating than facing the pain itself. In that sense, this novel made me reminiscent of [a:Camus's|957894|Albert Camus|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1606568448p2/957894.jpg] [b:The Plague|11989|The Plague|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1503362434l/11989._SY75_.jpg|2058116]. The character of monk Jupiter is similar to father Paneloux in trying to use an external religious system of belief to impose forced meaning to the senselessness of tragic fate, rejecting the absurd element of life and randomness by which suffering is imposed on young, as well as on old, on good, as well as on bad.
“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. And on that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons, that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of their taking off.“
Monk Jupiter is determined to subject the mystery of life and death to reason. For him, there are two options, there is a logically detectable system of explanation that is reachable through empirical observation, or there is no explanation at all, no meaning or greater plan of for life.
“It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences, and he had long intended putting it there. What he had lacked hitherto was a laboratory.”
Jupiter's quest unravels the stories of morally gray characters, full of flaws, but also full of imperfect and utterly human love and passion, complex real people that cannot be subjected to pure demise and punishment of sinners nor heavenly glory of saints. Both generous and selfish, cruel and merciful, innocent and sinful, the five characters are an archetypical representation of all of humanity; The Great Mother, The Orphan Girl, The Brother, The Teacher and The Beloved Son. Father Jupiter finds no answer at all, only unfinished life stories carried by flawed and somewhat self-serving love.
“The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.“
Life and death, as well as the complete meaning of suffering, will be not ever subjected and reached by human reason, and that is the quest that only leads to the death of characters that pursuit it, as we can see in brother Jupiter, father Paneloux ([b:The Plague|11989|The Plague|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1503362434l/11989._SY75_.jpg|2058116]) even Captain Ahab ([b:Moby-Dick or, the Whale|153747|Moby-Dick or, the Whale|Herman Melville|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327940656l/153747._SY75_.jpg|2409320]). Meaning, fate, love and hope cannot be empirically investigated, proven nor explained. One must be open to the indefinite mysteriousness of the world, and one cannot fool gods with his intellect and find a definite meaning of destiny.
In the famous finishing sentence Wilder detects love as the bridge of life and death and the only meaning, but at the same time throughout the novel shows that in this world, human love is always defective, never the same, and uniquely individual, just as our lives.
"Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well."