2007 books

[peteryoung]

45) Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927
In 1714 a bridge in Peru collapses killing five people, a priest who witnesses the accident is compelled to ask why those five were chosen by God to die, and after looking into each of the victim's lives he draws his conclusions. It's a necessary book about the danger of trying to divine religious meaning from random events and why bad things happen to undeserving people, written in a slightly arcane historical style that doesn't make for fluid reading but does instead capture the time and place very well indeed. I came to this book because I'd read that it served as inspiration for John Hersey's excellent Hiroshima, though I didn't get as much out of it as I'd hoped, with the conclusions drawn seeming somehow vague and, well, inconclusive.