Lincoln in the Bardo
By Midas / January 16, 2017 / 3 Comments / Audio Books
In his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary experience unlike any other, for no one but Saunders could conceive it.
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved 11-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. God has called him home. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body.
From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic historical framework into a thrilling supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo, a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.
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Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders’ first novel lives up to his reputation for eccentric melding of genres and forms. Lincoln may be in the title (which Lincoln is meant is another matter), but the book is as much about its other, fictional narrators as it is about historical figures. What other narrators? Well. Abraham Lincoln’s third son died of typhoid fever in early 1862, and for a time the president’s concentration was broken while the Civil War raged. Newspapers reported that he returned to the crypt by…
Disorienting, challenging and really brilliant This is not an easy book but I do think it’s a great one. It’s something you’ve never read before. Imagine those people in the last century who read Mrs. Dalloway or Ulysses for the first time. How strange it must have seemed to have life, experience and art compressed into a day, a party, a walk through Dublin. So it is with Lincoln in the Bardo it’s both challenging AND disorienting but extremely rewarding if you can push through your own discomfort and confusion and stay with a novel that…
“Our departure caused pain” Abraham Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son Willie died in February 1862. The grieving President visited the boy’s crypt in Georgetown’s cemetery several times. Out of this setting of a “white stone house,” George Saunders constructs his first novel. Adapting the Tibetan concept of the afterlife perceived as the transitional state of the misleading bardo, he populates his other-worldly realm with 166 voices.Â