Book Review: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.” 

I have not been very good about blogging these past two weeks or so.  I have not been very good about really anything these past two weeks or so.  I was sick for some of it, and then it all just fell apart from there.  The Renaissance Project has floundered, I haven't read very much, my apartment was a total mess (that's been resolved) and my journal probably thinks I have died.  My novels sat unwritten, my Camp Little Oak planning rested in a pile, and I barely scraped by in my calling.  I ate non-creative foods and wallowed mostly. Well, I am hopefully fixed.  And I am resolving these problems. 

One of the things that must be done is a book review.  We'll catch up someday, I promise.

When I was in junior high, I was part of a production of The Happy Journey to Camden and Trenton, a Thornton Wilder one act.  I hadn't really had much exposure to Thornton Wilder other than that.  As you may recall, last year, I read Our Town.  Because I liked that, my mother suggested The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

I read it on the plane returning from Christmas, and I quite enjoyed it!  Thank you, mother for the recommendation.  I have found that my mother and I have very similar tastes in many, many things, and I wonder if homeschooling didn't do that to a certain extent.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is an "investigative journalism piece" (though the entire story is fictional) into the lives of the victims of an Inca rope bridge collapse in Peru.  Their lives are strangely all interrelated, even though none of them know it. 

Thornton Wilder, essentially, is investigating the three degrees of separation theory before it was a thing.  I like the idea of interrelated lives, and I think that we have all experienced that exhilaration when someone we know comments on someone else we know's facebook posts. 

This Pulitzer prize winning piece of beauty looks into the question of life, death and pain in a strikingly distanced way, that makes it more intimate.  It also investigates the question of "Why do good things happen to bad people?" I have always enjoyed Wilder's simplicity that creates complexity, and I think that writers today forget that.  I know I do.  In fact, Wilder's publisher complained that this book was too short, and actually did all sorts of ridiculous publishing stunts to make it appear longer (margins so big that they just look silly, etc.).   It may be short, but it isn't short in meaning. 

4 Stars to Bridge of San Luis Rey.