POSITIVELY GOOD READS

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

by Jerome Charyn

Tragedies leave us wondering, why them and not me?

In Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Bridge of San Luis Rey, an 18th-century friar, Brother Juniper, witnesses an Inca rope bridge in Peru collapse and plunge five people to their deaths. Refusing to attribute the accident to randomness, Brother Juniper sets out to discern divine plan in it. He spends years looking into the lives of the five victims, whose stories make up the bulk of the book.

The Marquesa de Montemayor (victim 1) poured out her heart in letters to her adored daughter in Spain, who disliked her. The marquesa’s companion, the 14-year-old orphan Pepita (victim 2), had been tagged by the sainted Abbess Madre María del Maria to take up her work with the needy. Esteban (victim 3) was grieving for his dead twin brother and, rescued from an attempted suicide, had consented to join a long sea voyage. Uncle Pio (victim 4) was a devoted mentor to an actress who spurned him but agreed to let him take her son (victim 5) for a year of education. Why did each have to die at that particular time?

Brother Juniper ends up with a voluminous book but no firm answer, though he continues to believe God had a reason. He is burned by church authorities as a heretic for trying to ascertain God’s will. Wilder doesn’t repeat the friar’s folly in attempting to explain the unexplainable. The ending of the book, however, suggests that he thinks Brother Juniper may have missed the point. In the famous last words, the abbess, after noticing that some survivors changed for the better as a result of the accident, observes,“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Should Wilder have left it that Brother Juniper’s question was unanswerable and not have tried to soften the blow with a stab at meaning? It’s a question that readers may debate.




 


Home               My reviews               My friends' reviews