"The Bridge of San Luis Rey" by Thornton Wilder

 The fictional stories of the five people who fell to their deaths when a rope bridge in Peru collapsed in 1714. The five people are all connected. Their stories are told in intricate detail with rich descriptions; this is a novella in which the dictum 'show don't tell' is repeatedly flouted and the effect is to create something of beauty. 

Selected quotes:

• "The whole purpose of literature is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vehicle in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world." (The Marquesa de Montemayor; Pepita)
• "The Abbess was one of those persons who have allowed their lives to be gnawed away because they have fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of civilization."  (The Marquesa de Montemayor; Pepita)
• "The women in Peru, even her nuns, went through life with two notions: one, that all the misfortunes that might befall them were due to the fact that they were not sufficiently attractive to bind some man to their maintenance; and, two, that all the misery in the world was worth his caress."  (The Marquesa de Montemayor; Pepita)
• "He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer - a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with st
• rangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon." (Uncle Pio; Don Jaime)
• "The highest attribute of a cafe singer will always be her novelty."  (Uncle Pio; Don Jaime)
• "There was something in Lima that was wrapped up in yards of violet satin from which protruded a great dropsical head and two fat pearly hands; and that was its archbishop."  (Uncle Pio; Don Jaime)
• "Some days he regarded his bulk ruefully; but the distress of remorse was less poignant than the distress of fasting."  (Uncle Pio; Don Jaime)
• "He had to repeat over to himself his favourite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune."  (Uncle Pio; Don Jaime)
• "Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer."  (Uncle Pio; Don Jaime)
• "He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to heaven." (Perhaps an Intention)
• "She talked that night of all those out in the dark ... who had no one to turn to, for whom the world perhaps was more than difficult, without meaning."  (Perhaps an Intention)

A delightful, and short, book. October 2020; 126 pages

Winner of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God