🟥 The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) Review - Grim Reaper Builds a Bridge | Book Waffle

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) written by Thornton Wilder

Starting with a tragic event before rewinding is always a gamble.

It shows the author's hand. It diminishes stakes and intrigue. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell is another classic that does something similar. But while it sorta works in that book, I don't think it worked here.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey revolves around one Brother Juniper in 1700's Spanish Peru and his quest to find spiritual and religious meaning after the collapse of a ancient Incan rope bridge in Peru. Said collapse leads to the deaths of a diverse troupe of individuals, and our hero is laser-focused on digging into all of their personal business and finding out why fate chose them to die.

The good Brother searches through their affairs. Their taxes. The size of their undies and the size of their knobs. So basically our guy is the pre-modern equivalent of the NSA.

Jokes aside, this is an interesting framing to work with, for sure. It's also a boring one. 

See, the monotone narration is due to Brother Juniper's obsession with applying an analytical lens to theology. But, and I find myself repeating this from previous reviews, just because something is done faithfully does not mean it is engaging. And while an empirical + religious voice is a unique vehicle to tell the story through, the actual story itself is lackluster.

Put simply: there is no tension here.

We, as the audience, already know what will happen to the characters. We already know Brother Juniper will find nothing in his quest. And so what do we get?

Well, what I got was a four hour audiobook of meandering descriptions read by an actor (Sam Waterston) that sounded nearly as bored as I was.

I believe a lot more could have been done to build out Brother Juniper's character. There is so much thematic depth to explore with religion and how it attempts to make sense of reality. 

There are things to say about the nature of free will. Things to say about the problem of evil. And, while something does happen to Brother Juniper in the end, the thematic question of "Does this all have a purpose?" gets swept away oddly quick in favor of a #YOLO ending. Like the book can't bother itself to examine its own premise.

The character portraits of the deceased, while decidedly OK to read, are nowhere near strong enough to support this story on their own. The final chapter makes a valiant attempt to save the book with mixed success.

And so, a book that should have taken me an afternoon instead took me a week. Bleh.

🟥 Rating: 3/10