Books: San Luis

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY— Thornton Wilder—A. & C. Boni ($2.50). "On Friday noon, July the 20th, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below." The five people were: The Marquesa de Montemayor and Pepita, her companion, Esteban, the brother of Manuel, Uncle Pio, and Don Jaime the son of the actress whom he had loved and made famous. Now why had a bridge upon whose miraculous high path everyone in Peru had stepped at one time or another postponed its decay to include these particular people in its destruction? Was it an accident or an intention? Author Wilder explores the lives of the five; each one had achieved in life, just before the falling of the Bridge of San Luis Rey, a kind of completion. So at the end, "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." The delicacies of Author Wilder's prose cannot be intimated in so rude a summary of the material of his book, which will be acceptable, like his first novel The Cabala, mainly to those who are sophisticates in both life and letters.