The Bridge of San Luis Rey

By: Thornton Wilder / Narrated By: Sam Waterston

Length: 3 hrs and 42 mins

Exquisitely narrated! Well-crafted! …BUT…

It’s like this, see…

Waaaay back when, when I was but an angst-ridden teenaged punk rock Freshman in college, I worked in the (EGREGIOUS place to work!) UT Austin Texas Law Library. The guy who worked in the Copy Center (Seriously! A lousy place to work!) shift before mine, was a middle-aged, Uber-smart, dubiously rumpled man who made my own role of Chronic Underachiever look like NOTHING, turned me on to Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Mind. BLOWN… World. ROCKED…!

And to this day, it remains as one of The Best Crafted, Most Utterly Tragic stories I’ve ever ever read. And I’ll review it, like, soon… Cuz…

I could not help but compare The Bridge of San Luis Rey to it as I listened to the latter for this week.

No comparison.

Yeh yeh yeh Blah blah Pulitzer Prize for Thornton Wilder blah and all that -AND- …San Luis Rey written eons before -BUT- To me, I kept seeing a tragedy unfolding, trying to make sense of an act of Man vs. Bridge’s act of God, senseless senseless senseless life snuffed ignominiously out with, one hopes, SOME bit o’ Love SOMEwhere in between or at the end or p’raps it’s all what you make of that spark between birth and death.

Stay with me here…

The collapse of an oooooold Incan rope bridge sends five people plunging to the crags and river below with one Franciscan Brother Juniper pondering his near escape. He was riiiiiight about to cross and saw it all, and now he’s gathering the stories of the victims’ lives in an effort to see if there’s some empirical way to figure out the meaning of God’s part in all this.

We see a desperately unhappy Marquesa who smothers her lone child, Clara, into an entirely different country (Spain) and spends her days writing Clara letters that further alienate the now young woman. This is much to the detriment of a young orphan girl, Pepita, whom the Marquesa’s taken in as a Companion. Her utter self-absorption leaves the girl downcast, but a stray letter written by Pepita, where she begs to be taken back in by the Abbess who sent her the Marquesa’s way, is read by the Marquesa. FINALLY the Marquesa wakes to her life, seeing how she’s let the walls cave in on her, dulling her to the grand senses of Life, and has her affirming to Pepita, and cogitating on writing a letter of renewed courage and release to Clara. FINALLY! Courage!

And so she and Pepita are on the Bridge that day… POOF!

Esteban lives and loves with his twin brother Manuel until Manuel dies of sepsis. How is Esteban to go on? The aforementioned Abbess raised both boys, sees Esteban (Who’s calling himself Manuel… despair, you see…) flailing and sinking in abject dejection, and arranges for a ship’s Captain to speak to the young man. The Captain foils a suicide attempt and does indeed convince Esteban to join his next voyage. The Captain takes the base route with supplies, Esteban, meanwhile, goes above on? You guessed it: The Bridge… POOF!

Throw in a man of questionable repute who convinces his ex-actress ex-friend (she who now lives as a recluse after being disfigured by smallpox) to send her son with him, so that he might educate the boy OUTSIDE of her newly squalid life. Yessss, she finally agrees. The young lad goes with the man… across The Bridge…

POOF!

>yaaaaawn<

It ain’t Sam Waterston’s fault. The BEST DA of the original “Law & Order”, and man! was he great in “The Killing Fields” or what?!, Waterston is a surprisingly fine voice actor. As one can see, there’s much passion in this story, a wide variety of characters from all walks of Life, a juggling of stories that sometimes weave together, sometimes move far far away from each other. Author Thornton Wilder did indeed write an intricate story, and Waterston manages it all very well.

It’s just that, tho’ I see that Wilder’s overriding message was All Will Be Dead Soon, Dead from Living Memory and all that, and Only Love is The Bridge etc etc et freaking cetera, I just could NOT be swayed from thinking that I should’ve FELT more for Courage chosen over Despair, for Tragedy sometimes overriding Hope.

I dunno, maybe I missed the entire point of the story as I didn’t come away all glowing and fuzzy. M’ husband gave me the print version of this aaaaages ago, a slim volume, delicately illustrated, but alas I never got around to it, and the poor man thought I missed THE Story of the CENTURY.

Love is the answer! Love is the bond between us; Love is the bond between Now and the Ever Forever AFTER!

Nope, just came outta it thinking poor blighted fool, that Brother Juniper, martyred by the Inquisition.

What Love? Where?

All I could see was the Tragedy of Hope Snuffed Out.

P’raps the Ever-Bloomin’ Chronic Underachiever in me is stilllll holding court…. My Bad…