Why this book:  Selected by my reading group.  I had read it twice before and was happy to read it again.

My Impressions: This is a short book, about 120 pages and won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in the late 1920’s.  It is a series of stories, within a larger story of a Franciscan brother in 18th century Peru trying to understand God’s justice.  After an ancient Incan bridge had collapsed and five people had fallen to their deaths, the brother decided to research their lives in the belief that this could not have been a random act – God in his wisdom and mercy must have had a reason for putting these specific five people on the bridge when it collapsed.  He believed that with enough research he could find a pattern that made sense of these deaths.  He believed that man must be able to understand God’s justice, and it was inconceivable to him that a merciful and just God would let people die capriciously. 

The book then commences to tell the stories of the people who died when the bridge collapsed.  Each of these people was at a different point in their life’s journey, and like each of us, taking care of life’s business while pursuing happiness, fulfillment, and meaning in their own ways.   We see each of the adults chasing happiness and fulfillment down a series of dead end and blind alleys, each sad and tragic in their own way, but none of them any more or less bad or deserving of an untimely death than any of the rest of us. Two of the people who died were children, innocent of the sins and excesses for which we hold adults accountable.  The stories of these individuals were (for me, but not for everyone in my reading group) fascinating, not only for their own unique approaches to living, but for the insights they gave to life in 18th century colonial Peru.  At the book’s conclusion, the Franciscan brother predictably reaches no clear conclusions about how these people might have deserved their fate.  His exhaustive research was unsuccessful in finding a meaning in these people’s lives and deaths, unsuccessful in decoding fate and chance.   He and his research are subsequently deemed heretical by the Catholic Church, for whom fate and chance, the meaning of life and death, and God’s justice are matters of faith, not science and analysis.

Within the small city of colonial Lima, Peru, our five victims had all in some way crossed paths with the Abbess of Lima, who ran a home for orphans, the sick and the destitute.  The Abbess is something of a peripheral player in most of their lives, yet, as the book concludes and we are no further along in understanding the purpose of these people’s lives and why they died, our author returns to the Abbess, and her life.    By looking at her and how she lives, we are led down a different path to find meaning and value in the lives not only of those who died, but also in those they left behind. The book concludes with the Abbess thinking to herself, “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.”

I really like this book – it is an elegant little story about the search for meaning in life through the prism of a tragedy during a period in history and in a part of the world I find fascinating.  In a few years, I will read it again ‘for the first time,’ and again draw insight and inspiration from it.