The Bridges of Madison County
I have read The Bridges of Madison County, a 1992 best-selling novel written by Robert James Waller that was made into a film of the same name in 1995, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Eastwood and Meryl Streep.
The book tells the brief love affair between Robert Kincaid, a post-middle-aged, freelance photographer, and Francesca Johnson, an Italian war bride, 45 years old who lives in Iowa with her husband and two children.
They meet by chance in the summer of 1965 while Francesca’s relatives are away at the Illinois state fair and Robert stops by the farmhouse to ask directions for Roseman Bridge. Although he is a completed stranger, she agrees to guide him to the nearby bridge and afterward invites him for iced tea and then supper. He talks of poetry, art and their mass-marketing enemies.
The dreamy Neapolitan girl, bored farm wife, wakes up. She invites him back for supper the next night, and with the help of a little brandy they begin their four-day affair, a secret sexual relationship that fundamentally changes them both.
After those four days they never meet again, bur their lives are interlocked until death.
Later, Francesca chronicles the affair in a diary which her grown children read; they never would have expected their mother to be capable of the passion she experienced with Kincaid.
This is the story of a special love that happens just once in a lifetime…if you are lucky.
Jonatan Carabantes Díaz. B2.2
