So I obtained a copy of The Bridge at San Luis Rey. And read it in two sittings.
What about the movie? Had it captured the book? Oh yes. And even more so.

Cover of Original 1927 Edition
The book is a remarkably compact (less than 50,000 words) literary fable. Its style is flat and direct, although, in fact, the story is quite complex and nuanced. It examines what love is and (mostly) isn’t. It ruminates on literature as a “notation of the heart” and has characters who are scribes (semi-mute twins who have developed their own abbreviated language), letter writers (we’re told the Marquesa’s posthumous collection is a Spanish bestseller), book writers (the compiling of Friar Juniper’s gets him into the Ultimate World of Hurt), and a mysterious “I” who in Part 1, “Perhaps an Accident”, wonders if he knows things Juniper doesn’t and then goes silent. All this is carried on against the philosophical backdrop of God’s will and action in the world.
In retrospect, I’m glad in high school I was confronted only with “comparing and contrasting” the small town characters in Our Town.
But really. How could Thornton Wilder have morphed into a Latin American writer? That chronicler of Our Town’s everytown (at least in New England)—how could this be? Was I the first to “discover” Thornton Wilder, magical realist?
In my own mind I wavered. I wanted so much for magical realism to remain in its original purity, essentially a literary style a priori unavailable to any non Latin-American writer. I don’t want magical realism to go toward this—a definition I found in Serendipity, an online magazine devoted to magical realism: “So what’s the difference between magical realism and fantasy? Definitions of what magical realism is and isn’t abound, but for the sake of brevity, let’s say it should incorporate the following: a reality similar to our own, in which the impossible can occur without comment; and a self-aware narrator, prepared to embark on a relationship with the reader outside the one afforded by the story.” Later a passing nod is given to the Latin aspect, quoting another critic who considers magical realism “ fantasy in Spanish.”
No, oh no. To me magical realism isn’t fantasy at all. It’s life, magnified. There are no unicorns or elves or parallel universes. All that happens happens right here on Planet Earth to earthly creatures. To me magical realism just adds another layer of reality to our modern pragmatic, ostensibly empirically-based, one.
And, after a while thinking about it, to me it can only be Latin. The rest of us have darknesses too, but of other cultural types. The setting needs to include the overlay of a not-totally-eradicated native culture clashing with Catholicism, overtly or covertly. So I can (almost) accept Bless Me Ultima, good New Mexican that Rudolpho Anaya is, because the two issues meet. (And besides, New Mexico is only one step away from Latin America.) But I can’t accept The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. For many more reasons than just wrong locale, wrong culture. Still, it appears on the goodreads list of popular magical realist novels and has been shelved over 50 times in the magical realism section of bookstores.
So what about The Bridge at San Luis Rey?
Wilder doesn’t come up on a Google search of magical realist authors. At least on compiled lists (Wikipedia and others), or up to Google search’s page 10 (about the first 200 entries.) Even in places where people cast their nets wide enough to include everybody short of J.R. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien.
In fact I had to query both his name and MR (as it’s known affectionately by its aficionados, myself included) to find anyone at all who’d seen the link. There are a few. Still, I seem to stand alone in my awe of the scene in which the Marquesa de Montemayor steps into a Velasquez painting to steal a necklace her daughter covets. The Marquesa, drunken ruin that she is, does it quite convincingly in the movie, conversing with the painter and his subjects. In the book she even ruminates about climbing into a Titian one day. And then the story moves on. To me, this scene is the very essence of what magical realism means.
So does Mr. Wilder, good humanist New Englander that he is, make the grade? Let’s see. Setting. Check. Native/Catholic. Check. Events outside mainstream reality. Check. Time altering. Check. Even Self Aware Author. There is that mysterious “I” in Chapter 1. So check.
In the end, that scene with the painting is enough for me. But it doesn’t hurt that it’s the Inquisition, the bridge is heading toward Cuzco, everybody wears black. And there are the llamas. What more could I ask for?
“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.” from The Bridge of San Luis Rey