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motobass4321 's review for:
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder
This brief novel tells the story of five lives cast to their abrupt, premature ends by the catastrophic failure of "the finest bridge in all Peru" on "Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714" and the story of some of the other lives touched by these five. First, it is beautifully written. Everything essential to the story is there and nothing that isn't is. The introduction to the edition I read is hard to disagree with...
About the writing, the introduction says, "Wilder's sentences are elegant, but never self-admiring, exquisitely balanced, yet not overformal, and complex without being elaborate." The style is aphoristic and asks big questions.
One subject of the novel is writing itself. The letters written by a mother, one of the victims, the Marquesa de Montmayor, to her daughter later enter into the Spanish language as exemplary texts for future students of the art of writing. Her prose is taught both in its formal attributes and for its content - its ability to show the deepest workings of the heart. "It is the famous Letter LVI, known to the Encyclopedists as her Second Corinthians because of its immortal paragraph about love: ..." The Marquesa's story is quite touching - they all are!
Various characters wonder whether they will be remembered, whether their life's work will continue after they are gone, whether or how they can go on after unbearable losses. Brother Juniper was a Franciscan monk who witnessed the accident. He asked himself, Why these five? He firmly believed that all that happened was God's will therefor was good and that a proper, detailed look at these lives could potentially "surprise the reason" for their fates. He wanted "to prove it, historically, mathematically, to his converts, - poor, obstinate converts, so slow to believe that their pains were inserted into their lives for their own good." And it was his research into these lives, and the publication of it, during the Peruvian Inquisition, that resulted in his being judged a heretic and burned at the stake. The event did not stop with the five, in that sense.
I very highly recommend this book. It is amazing. The Marquesa, her daughter, and Pepita, the Abbess Madre Maria del Pilar, Esteban and Manuel, Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole, Captian Alvarado, the viceroy, the bishop, and Brother Juniper - all are wonderfully alive creations. The story so well balanced - not answering questions but artfully posing them - about love and memory, fate, art, writing, the meaning of life and its vulnerability to "acts of God" (as the lawyers have it).
I read this as part of a Back to the Classics Challenge for 2017 in the category of An Award-winning Classic.
Thornton WIlder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey is as close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature. Written near the end of the Roaring Twenties by a man barely out of his twenties, it nonetheless feels, in its exquisite universality and ease of timeless application, ancient, classical, almost biblical.
About the writing, the introduction says, "Wilder's sentences are elegant, but never self-admiring, exquisitely balanced, yet not overformal, and complex without being elaborate." The style is aphoristic and asks big questions.
One subject of the novel is writing itself. The letters written by a mother, one of the victims, the Marquesa de Montmayor, to her daughter later enter into the Spanish language as exemplary texts for future students of the art of writing. Her prose is taught both in its formal attributes and for its content - its ability to show the deepest workings of the heart. "It is the famous Letter LVI, known to the Encyclopedists as her Second Corinthians because of its immortal paragraph about love: ..." The Marquesa's story is quite touching - they all are!
Spoiler
Various characters wonder whether they will be remembered, whether their life's work will continue after they are gone, whether or how they can go on after unbearable losses. Brother Juniper was a Franciscan monk who witnessed the accident. He asked himself, Why these five? He firmly believed that all that happened was God's will therefor was good and that a proper, detailed look at these lives could potentially "surprise the reason" for their fates. He wanted "to prove it, historically, mathematically, to his converts, - poor, obstinate converts, so slow to believe that their pains were inserted into their lives for their own good." And it was his research into these lives, and the publication of it, during the Peruvian Inquisition, that resulted in his being judged a heretic and burned at the stake. The event did not stop with the five, in that sense.
I very highly recommend this book. It is amazing. The Marquesa, her daughter, and Pepita, the Abbess Madre Maria del Pilar, Esteban and Manuel, Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole, Captian Alvarado, the viceroy, the bishop, and Brother Juniper - all are wonderfully alive creations. The story so well balanced - not answering questions but artfully posing them - about love and memory, fate, art, writing, the meaning of life and its vulnerability to "acts of God" (as the lawyers have it).
I read this as part of a Back to the Classics Challenge for 2017 in the category of An Award-winning Classic.