Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel
Named One of Paste's Best Novels of the Decade - Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, USA Today, and Maureen Corrigan, NPR - One of Time's Ten Best Novels of the Year - A New York Times Notable Book - One of O: The Oprah Magazine's Best Books of the Year
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 eleven-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 returns, alone, to the crypt several times 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 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.
Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction's ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?
"A luminous feat of generosity and humanism."--Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review
"A masterpiece."--Zadie Smith
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Community Reviews
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
343 pages
What’s it about?
So this book is truly different- beginning with what's a bardo? The definition of bardo: (in Tibetan Buddhism) a state of existence between death and rebirth, varying in length according to a person's conduct in life and manner of, or age at, death. This whole novel takes place in the bardo right after Willie Lincoln dies. It is 1862 and the Civil War is not going well. When 11 year-old Willie dies of typhus Mr. Lincoln is deeply depressed, and yet he knows that he is inflicting this same grief on so many families by sending their sons into battle. Literally we see his solitary grief juxtaposed along side the collective grief of a nation. The novel poses so many interesting questions, all seen through a motley cast of characters inhabiting the bardo with Willie Lincoln.
What did it make me think about?
By the end of this novel I was asking myself all kinds of questions. What exactly does happen when we die? What about all our unresolved situations here on earth? Do we only fully experience humanity as we interact with each other? Are we all more important as a part of a whole than as individuals? How responsible are we for our actions? This novel gives us so much to think about….
Should I read it?
The format of this book may throw you for a loop but it is truly an amazing book! It is just so different. My advice is to just start reading and don’t stop. Patience will be required by some, and I am sure even with patience, some readers just won’t like this book. To be clear- at ten pages I was thinking, “what is this?” Don’t over think it and the beauty, wit, and wisdom will come.
Quote-
This is another book with so many quotes I don’t know where to begin…
“He is just one.
And the weight of it about to kill me.
Have exported this grief.
Some three thousand times. So far. To date. A mountain. Of boys. Someone’s boys. Must keep on with it. Many not have the heart for it. One thing to pull the lever when blind to the result. But here lies one dear example of what I accomplish by the orders I-
May not have the heart for it.”
“His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and , given his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.”
If you like this try-
Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
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