Reviews

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

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fbroom's review against another edition

I should’ve known. I couldn’t connect to the characters because they were so many of them maybe? It’s a collection of few short stories that overlap. The bridge falls, 5 people die, The priest tries to understand God’s will. Why would these five people die? why them? so he explores each and every story but I couldn’t connect to any of the stories.

kcrouth's review against another edition

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3.0

A priest, a chance eyewitness to a deadly accident, explores the lives of the five victims, seemingly linked only by the accident in which they died, discovering the mark and memories they left behind.

book_concierge's review against another edition

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3.0

3.5***
The novel begins at noon on July 20, 1714, when the “finest bridge in all Peru” suddenly collapses, sending five people plummeting to their deaths. A Franciscan missionary, Brother Juniper, witnesses the calamity and asks, “Why those five?” He feels this Act of God must have specifically targeted those people, and none of the other thousands of citizens who might have been on the bridge instead. So he investigates the lives of the five victims in an attempt to understand what happened.

This is a moral fable in which Wilder tries to answer the question, “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?” He explores the characters’ motivations in life, their triumphs and disappointments. Its universal appeal is that Wilder is writing about human nature – conflicted, noble, contradictory, loving, and exasperating. He holds a mirror up to the reader’s own soul, asking the reader to examine his or her own actions and reactions.

Then Prime Minister Tony Blair read the closing sentences of this work at the memorial service for British victims of the Sept 11 attack on the World Trade Center: “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.”

libellum_aphrodite's review against another edition

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4.0

Hats of to Wilder for making a story that occurs in South America read with the hallmarks of the fiction written there. Excellent character studies and a poignant portrayal of how we try to make sense of tragedy.

alidottie's review against another edition

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3.0

This is a beautifully written book that I had trouble getting into at times. It seems I was more interested in some of the characters than others (every chapter is the story about a different character that plunged to their death when the Bridge at San Luis Rey broke). It was also interesting to read about how the success of this book changed Thorton Wilder's life--as I am sure is true of all authors whose books become wildly popular "overnight."