Finished: The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Wilder). A book that goes straight to the heart. A thought-provoking look at why any given person dies on any given day. Is there a grand plan of God's? Does He really get so absorbed in the details of who lives and who dies? Is He punishing people? Or, is it just His will? Or does everyone just have their predestined time to die no matter how they've lived their lives? I've never looked into reading The Bride of San Luis Rey because, frankly, the title led me to believe it was probably some war novel. Not until I took the time to read a synopsis did I decide it would be worth reading...and it's a Pulitzer Prize winner to boot.

It is the story, set in 1714, of five random people in Peru who perish when an ancient suspension bridge, woven of osier by the Incas, snaps and collapses over a huge ravine in the Andes one day. A Franciscan monk, Brother Juniper, witnesses the event first hand, as he had been about to cross the bridge himself. He became determined to figure out why these people perished...was it God's plan?

    Brother Juniper stopped to wipe his forehead and to gaze up on the screen of snowy peaks in the distances, then into the gorge below him filled with the dark plumage of green trees and green birds and traversed by its ladder of osier....At all events he felt at peace. Then his glance fell upon the bridge, and at that moment a twanging noise filled the air, as when the string of some musical instrument snaps in a disused room, and he saw the bridge divide and fling five gesticulating ants into the valley below.
   Anyone else would have said to himself with secret joy: "Within ten minutes myself...!" But it was another thought that visited Brother Juniper: "Why did this happen to those five?" If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. And on that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons, that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of their taking off.

So then we are treated to chapters about each of the victims, and meet some colorful, sympathetic, and not-so-sympathetic people. They all end up being connected to each other via a couple of different people. I wanted to know more of each of their stories! In the end, the Abbess, who had been personally close to two of the victims, says to herself at the large funeral service:

   "Even now," she thought, "almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

Very simple words, but very profound.