"The Bridge of San Luis Rey" by Thornton Wilder *****

•  US author
• Pulitzer Prize winner
• Originally published in 1927
• This edition published in 2003
• Foreword by Russell Banks
• "...as close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature."
• "The underlying assumption of the novel is that any one of us could have been on that bridge when it collapsed and threw five people into the abyss."
• "There is something about the antique tone and atmosphere of these works that allows one to achieve almost immediate liftoff from one's mundane, day-to-day life and travel to a world of long ago and far away, where one can more easily consider ultimate matters.  It's perhaps a necessary element of fable."
• "It is interesting, therefore, and possibly useful to consider this novel in the long and (at the time of this writing) still darkening shadow of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001."
• Vocabulary:
• censor:  incense diffuser, used to clean out bad spirits and scents......also a source for use of the word censor in terms of written documents being censored?
• The Victims:
• Marquesa de Montemajor and her companion, Pepita
• Esteban, one of twin brothers
• Uncle Pio and Jaime, the son of the Perichole
• Quotes:
• p.7..."Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan."
• p.7..."But this collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey was a sheer Act of God.  It afforded a perfect laboratory.  Here at last one could surprise His intentions in a pure state."...Brother Juniper, witness to the collapse
• p.45..."Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other."
• p.50..."And at once he sacrificed everything to it, if it can be said we ever sacrifice anything save what we know we can never attain, or what some secret wisdom tells us it would be uncomfortable or saddening to possess."....Hmmmm
• p.70...."...he was sent out by the government to inspirit some half-hearted rebellions in the same mountains, so that the government could presently arrive and whole-heartedly crush them."
• p.83..."He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living."
• p.99..."The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed."
• p.107...."There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."....closing line of the book
• Notes:
• Uncle Pio's 6 attributes of an adventurer:
• a memory for names and faces
• the gift of tongues
• inexhaustible invention
• secrecy
• the talent for falling into conversation with strangers
• freedom from conscience
• Uncle Pio's 3 life aims:
• the desire to be "varied, secret, and omniscient"
• to be near beautiful women and be their worshiper
• to be near those who loved Spanish literature, especially dramas
• Review:  I am certainly not the first, nor will I be the last, to recognize the brilliance of this novella.  This is my first Thornton Wilder read.....how I could have made it this far in life without reading his work is beyond me.  Somehow he manages to create vivid and memorable characters who share the experience of dying when a bridge collapses.  From that event he proceeds to ask profound and essentially unanswerable questions, of the sort we all try to address or avoid throughout our life.  Is there intention?  Is there meaning?  When is it the right time for as person to die?  Is there such a thing or is it all happenstance?  The introduction for this 75th anniversary edition of the novel by Russell Banks is excellent.  He draws a parallel between the experience of those surviving the bridge collapse to those surviving the 9/11 attacks.  The same eternal questions apply.  Lovely, powerful prose makes this so very readable and timeless!