Book Report: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

What a Whole Lotta Love.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder is a short, gentle book despite it beginning with a tragedy and ending with, like perhaps the best stories, yourself and your own interpretations of what just happened.

It is a famous book, first printed in 1927, and has never gone out of print. The copy I acquired was printed in 1928 and lists many reprintings within those two years, which research shows to be rather unusual for the time. The late 20s were interesting (perhaps in the gypsy curse sort of way) in and of themselves: astounding changes were occurring in our knowledge of the universe and the knowledge of ourselves with a heady kind of optimism that would resolve into crashing trough Dust Bowls and Depression and ultimately World War Sequel: Bigger, Boomier, Now with Air Conditioning.

Illustrations by Amy Drevenstedt

The Bridge was suggested to me by a friend who is a poet and is also in love with Wilder's language and I can see why: Wilder has an intimate knowledge of English and his sentence construction is sublime. However, I think this would be a hard book to sell to high schoolers -- it is not a book of action nor of romance (in the adventurous spirit sort of way, there is a much deeper romance in the Bridge beneath its surface) but rather of quiet contemplation, melancholia associated with the advancement of time, and a questing for what's going on in this crazy universe all in mere 34,000 words.

I also had no idea that the Spanish Inquisition was active in Peru, I tend to associate that institution with either Monty Python or Umberto Ecco's the Name of the Rose, so that was a fascinating rabbit hole to fall through.

If I had read the Bridge when I was in my teens I don't think I would have appreciated it for what it was, though the last lines of the book I do know to be famous and I have heard them quoted before without realizing the source. It could be said then that the book itself is a bridge to these last lines, for they are a candle in the darkness that seeks to envelop us, regardless of whether it is our own sense of darkness or a darkness built by the machinations of others.