Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel

I have to say upfront that I’ve been a Saunders fan since CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, so I jumped to order this book as soon as I saw it. It’s his first novel, and it’s very Saunders-like — meaning that it’s not like anything he’s done before, because that’s how he does things. It’s written in an unusual voice, which I found a little disorienting and difficult to follow at first. But once you get it, it flows. The story is told by numerous characters and narrators, both contemporaneous characters and historical sources and commentators looking back on the events from the near present. It feels like a play, with characters speaking in turn as much to the audience as to each other. The central event is the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie. Willie dies at the end of his father’s first year in office, as the Civil War, and the horrors of the war, ramp up. President Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, were devastated by their son’s death, and haunted by guilt that they hadn’t done enough to prevent it as Willie’s sickness worsened. Willie has arrived in a kind of limbo — the bardo — after his death. This limbo is populated by a whole array of characters, many of whom have been there for decades, never able to accept that they have died. For many, some issue, grievance, or unfinished business in general prevents them from letting go of their lives. In Willie’s case, the unwillingness to let go comes from both sides. His father cannot let go of Willie, visiting and staying by his resting place, even taking him from the crypt back into his arms. And Willie is simply taken before he is ready, not letting go of his father, longing to have his father feel his touch. Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III are seemingly permanent residents of the bardo. They take a special interest in Willie. Normally children as young as Willie don’t stay in the bardo very long, but Willie is a special case. Lincoln provides the view of Willie from life, the child stolen away too early and maybe avoidably. Vollman and Bevins provide the view from the other side, where Willie is not in heaven but lost in this limbo, from which he can’t touch the living world or be touched by the father he left behind. Vollman and Bevins try to help Willie, although the help he really needs, letting go of life, is something they can’t even do for themselves. At the same time, they try to help the president, bringing him together with his son so that each can accept Willie’s death, so that Willie can let go of life and Lincoln can let go of death. All of this happens in parallel with the events of the Civil War, a virtual flood of death itself. Willie’s death and Lincoln’s reaction to it come at the same time that so many are grieving the deaths of so many, under the orders of Lincoln himself. The preident feels the shock of a son’s death while the war’s losses are shocking the mothers and fathers of sons fighting the war, the war that Lincoln feels responsibility for and that he and his critics are seeing go horribly wrong at this stage. The images of Lincoln that Saunders presents, overcome and paralyzed by grief, paint a picture of a depressed president being tested. He must have been tempted to try to end the war and the deaths that are doing to countless parents what Willie’s death is doing to him. Willie and all the dead in the bardo teach Lincoln about the commonality of suffering and the reality of death. When he does let go of Willie, he lets go of grief’s paralysis, for himself and his presidency. He turns a corner away from grief and sorrow and toward resolve. The dead learn a similar resolve. Willie breaks the taboo of the bardo when he says, “Everyone, we are dead!” One measure of a book is its emotional effect. I think this is an oddly inspiring book. “Oddly” because so much of it is about death. But it’s also about an attitude — moving forward and not clinging to things that are over and done with. That goes not only for death but for all the changes we go through within life.

George Saunders’ new novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo” is a unique work of historical fiction. It uses a series of accounts, some real, some fictional, all revolving around once singular, true occurrence. While the staccato placement of accounts may have felt sort of jarring on the page it served its particular purpose, in some areas, beautifully. Saunders’ use of contrasting accounts is particularly interesting. Two consecutive accounts on one page describe the moon as incredibly clear, and completely obfuscated. I can’t quite place his intention surrounding those conflicts (but then, unlike George Saunders, I don’t have a genius grand) but it seriously underscores the human capacity for error which was so prominently displayed in the era of the Civil War. George Saunders, ever a fan of the strange, hilarious, and terrifying, managed to create an equivalent of purgatory both calm and incredibly frightening; a “bardo” or inbetween state that its inhabitants are consciously unaware of. To admit one’s own death is embrace it, and to disappear forever. Rather than admit their deaths, the inhabitants of the cemetery in which most of the book’s occurrences unfold emerge from their “sick boxes” each evening, wandering aimlessly within the cemetery grounds, unable to effect any change in the outside world, and waiting endlessly for family that never comes. In the world of the living, meanwhile, Lincoln had spent weeks believing his son was going to recover, when in fact, he only got weaker. While his son suffered through his final hours, Lincoln held a feast. Some of the accounts featured in the book judge Lincoln quite harshly for this, but can it really be blamed? He was, after all, the president, and was expected to hold dinners at the white house, although the merriment may well have been in excess. His son had been ill for weeks, how was he to know this was poor Willie’s final day? All of these accounts of his faults, and the imagined thoughts in his head serve one, perfectly executed purpose - to paint Abraham Lincoln as human. He was imperfect. In his early days his handling of the Civil War was clumsy and purposeless. He held a loud, raucous party while his boy suffered. But he loved his son. No account Saunders created could demonstrate that more than the truth of history - the first night Willie Lincoln was interred, Abraham Lincoln was absent from the Whitehouse. The president was seen by the gatekeeper of the cemetery, entering late in the evening, and not leaving until morning. This emotional momentum is echoed by the voices of the chorus of ghosts present in the cemetery, who come to terms with their own death largely by witnessing the purity of sorrow felt by Lincoln, but they do get tedious. The purposeful repetition was overused quite often throughout the novel, and I think a more judicious editor would have done the book some good. Additionally, I think that the utter lack of standard prose detracts from George Saunders's greatest asset - his voice. His capacity to display people at their barest, simplest, most childlike emotional state was largely absent from the novel, replaced by an editorial echo of the loss felt by the nation during the civil war. Either way, Saunders presents an incredibly introspective story - one where missed opportunity, loss, and a deep sense of mourning overpower any of the books faults. Personal notes - I would rank George Saunders amongst the greatest fiction writers who have ever lived, and as perhaps the greatest ever American fiction writer (high praise considering there is a Kurt Vonnegut quote eternally present on my chest.) His transition from the short story to the novel underscores a new potential for him to exercise his voice. One I hope he will make ample use of.

(In Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo is 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.) William Wallace "Willie" Lincoln was eleven-years-old when he passed away in the White House after suffering a protracted bout of typhoid fever. His younger brother, Tad, also had the fever but survived. Willie's funeral was at the White House and he was then temporarily interred in the Carroll family vault at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown. The Lincoln family anticipated eventually interring Willie at a cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. When Abe Lincoln was murdered three years later, Willie's casket accompanied that of his father on the train to their final resting place in Illinois. Willie Lincoln reportedly had an exuberant personality and appeared to be the favored child of both parents. His death seems to have hastened Mary Lincoln's slide into mental distress, and it had a pronounced emotional impact on his father. In his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders presents a fictionalized account of how Willie Lincoln's death might possibly have influenced the course of social advancement in the United States. The "bardo" envisioned by George Saunders was the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown where Willie was laid to rest. By day it was just an ordinary cemetery whose oldest burial dated back to the Revolutionary War, but by night it was a spirit-infested gathering place for many of the tormented souls whose bodies were interred there. The spirits would rise from their graves at dusk and spend the nighttime visiting among themselves and re-living their past lives, often giving the same speeches night after night. When daylight approached they went back underground and rested in their "sick boxes" with eyes closed so that they did not see the putrid remains that stayed within the boxes The residents of the cemetery or bardo did not realize they were dead. Many knew that they had been brought to this place while convalescing in their "sick boxes" by multitudes of relatives and friends. The boxes had been buried, with the patients inside, and the arrivals waited patiently for their loved ones to return or for their circumstances to change. There was something beyond, and occasionally people would explode in a burst of light and noise and move to the next destination, but most were afraid of that transition and struggled to remain where they were. Infants and young children usually left immediately, but older individuals would either grow tired and disillusioned and give up, or they would be talked into leaving by visiting apparitions - or they reluctantly stayed put. Things began to change when young Willie Lincoln arrived at the cemetery. Willie's spirit was sitting atop the Carroll family vault the night after his funeral, and the adult spirits were assuming that he would soon be taking flight to the next place, but then something odd happened. Willie's father showed up at the cemetery riding a horse so short that the rider's feet almost touched the ground. The father entered the vault, pulled his son's casket out from where it was shelved, opened it and began to mourn his lost son. The visit was highly unusual and it caught the attention of all of the spirits. When the President left later that night he said aloud that he would return. Many of the residents thought that might bring about some changes in their circumstances. As the tale plays out, Willie and his father have an impact on one another as well as on the spirits of the bardo, and some of those spirits manage to impart their thoughts into the mind of Abraham Lincoln. The author, George Saunders, has penned a very unique book that draws upon multiple styles of writing. One reviewer went so far as to state that the author may have engineered a whole new writing genre with this effort. Saunder's "bardo," while closely following the Tibetan model, is also somewhat reminiscent of the Grover's Corners Cemetery residents of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," although those envisioned by Saunders sometimes have grotesque appearances that do not resemble their earthly bodies. The historical depictions, such as one set describing a White House holiday party, are pieced-together snippets from various diaries, historical journals, books, etc, in much the same manner as those made famous by Ken Burns. The fictional residents of the bardo also speak in snippets that gradually reveal their past lives and concerns. The writing can seem fragmented, but sticking with the award-winning choppy tale results is a most satisfying reading experience. I recommend Lincoln in the Bardo without reservation!

This book. This book is not for everyone. It’s an enigma. I went from loving it to being less than enthralled by it… I almost entirely gave up on it about halfway through, but pushed on and finally found myself enjoying it again. Lincoln in the Bardo was recommended to me as a book to possibly teach/have students research in high school AP Literature and Composition, but by a quarter of the way through, I KNEW this was absolutely not a book I’d ever be comfortable teaching… I personally can’t hand this to a student, and below, I’ll tell you why. Lincoln in the Bardo has many awards with claims of immense literary merit; they say a novel of its like has never been written, and that may be so, but even so, I found it… Lacking? Obscene? Grandiose? Confusing? Powerful? Tedious? Engrossing? Boring? Strange? Can I check off all of the above? Because I’m going to have to say it falls into every single one of those categories in one way or another. For one, I’ve never read a book with over 104 chapters in it. I mean, this novel is not that long, coming in at just over 340 pages. I’d expect a dozen or two chapters, of course, but over 100? Really? Well, they say this novel is unlike any other, and in the chapter category, I’ll say that’s probably true. What really got me about the chapters is that many just end mid-sentence. And while that was strange in the beginning, it actually worked really well at the end, except that’s not how the novel truly ended. For the last 10% of the novel (read this via Kindle and audiobook), it seemed that every single chapter was the perfect conclusion, but instead, it just kept going. This was frustrating to me, to say the least, but I will admit that I enjoyed almost all of the last 10% of the novel, except for the completely uncalled for lewd “shock value” scene, which Saunders seems so fond of using, as he’s peppered them throughout this novel, and I just don’t see the point, nor did I enjoy, them. But let me start at the beginning. When I first tried to read this novel, I bought it on Kindle and was listening to it via text-to-speech, and that was a terrible idea. This novel isn’t written like others, and Saunders instead goes back and forth between his fictitious spirit characters and actual primary sources, such as letters and diary entries from eyewitness accounts, surrounding Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and little Willie Lincoln’s death. Trying to listen to the novel go back and forth between the fiction and primary sources in a dead monotone computer voice just wasn’t working, and I had no idea what was happening in this novel. As I was driving on my way to work, I couldn’t just stop of follow along with my Kindle, so I spent an hour listening via text-to-speech, trying so hard to figure out what was happening, to no avail. At that point, I was ready to throw in the towel and thought this novel wasn’t for me. But then, I checked with my library, and they had the audiobook available! Praise God, “I’ll try again!” I thought. I’m still not sure if that was a good idea on my part, but let’s just say this was an experience. So, the audiobook has 166 narrators. You read that right. 166 different narrators. Again, they say this book is unprecedented and there is none other out there like it. In this aspect, I agree. 166 narrators? Alright, let’s hear it. So, I began listening. And you know what, listening via audiobook made this novel come alive (no pun intended), and I really got into it! Nick Offerman narrates as one of the main spirit characters, Hans Vollman, and boy does he do a great job! I loved him in “Parks and Recreation,” and he was fantastic in this novel as well. Truth be told, I might not have finished this novel had he not been the main narrator. He really brings the story to life, and I can’t say enough good about him! But anyway, the two main spirits, Vollman and Bevins, were fabulously crafted, though some of their stories a bit strange, and I found myself drawn in by them as they perpetuate the story. They were intriguing to me, and I enjoyed the back and forth nature of their stories/dialogue and the real primary sources. The fact that Saunders intertwined historical documents and eyewitness accounts about the events surrounding Lincoln and his dying child, Willie, gave the story validity, even if some of the accounts were boring and repetitive, as I eventually found them to be… I don’t really find pages upon pages of eyewitness accounts concerning what the moon looked like the evening Willie lay dying, or pages of accounts of the color of Abraham Lincoln’s eyes all that interesting… but I digress. Initially, I was really enjoying this novel. At least, the first 15% of it I really enjoyed. But then, somewhere between 15-25% of the way through the novel, things got… weird. It turns out, our spirit guide, Vollman, is actually running around naked with a “huge swollen member” impeding him from doing things. At this point, I was like, “What?” Why is this included in this novel? There is no historical reason, and it doesn’t fit, nor is this something I want my students reading about in class… but it only happened once, so I pushed past it. However, Vollman’s “member” was randomly mentioned throughout the whole rest of the novel, so it did get to be a bit too much. We learn in the very first chapter that Vollman wants to consummate his marriage with his wife, but can’t (because he’s dead…and won’t admit it), but is that the reason he runs around naked and Saunders continues to draw attention to his “member”? I can’t pinpoint a valid reason for its inclusion aside from Saunder’s wanting to shock the reader, which in my case, he did, because it came right out of left field… Every. Single. Time. Now, that’s not all that was shocking. Like I said, there are 166 narrators in this novel. Some narrators literally read only one sentence from a historical document, while others play larger parts, and making up those larger parts, are many, many spirits. I’m just guessing here, but I’d say there are at least 30 different spirits in the cemetery that chime in or insist on telling their story to young Willie at some point over the course of the novel… Poor Willie, who has just arrived in the graveyard and has no idea what’s happened to him, or what’s happening around him. Most of the other spirits stories did nothing to actually move the story along. One couple in particular made my skin crawl and I see no purpose to them whatsoever: The Barons. These people are despicable, and every other word out of their mouths are “f— you/them/him/her.” Now, I’m no scholar, but this is set in 1862, the day young Willie dies/is interred in his crypt. That being said, the use of the F word didn’t really exist in the manner in which The Barons so liberally use it, as they yell at everyone and everything using this cuss. This just didn’t sit right with me. It didn’t fit with the narrative, was 100% shocking and unexpected, and gave me pause. Was the F word used like that in 1862? Well, everything I looked up concerning The F word and its popular usage and meaning says it didn’t come into the use it currently has, the same use The Baron’s use it for, until around the 1900s, so I personally don’t feel like this part of the story holds any merit, which is strange, because it’s very obvious Saunders did a ton of research for this novel. Like I said, he spends a good deal of time dishing out eyewitness accounts of the moon, Abraham Lincoln’s ugliness, and a whole slew of other information to validate the time period, which Saunders would have had to dig for. So why the use of the F word if that’s not something that would have been said back then in this manner? The only thing I can think of here is that it was purely for “shock value,” just like the orgy scene at the end of the novel that had no place or reason for being there at all. I’m not saying that The Barons use the F word and other cusses occasionally. I’m saying it’s every other word for pages upon pages. I had my windows down in the car as I was listening, and let me tell you, I turned beat red and paused the audible, rolled up the windows, turned the sound way down, and was still uncomfortable listening to those two characters rant. Wow. They are intense, and they randomly pop up all over the place for the rest of the novel, touting their lovely language, so you never know when you’re about to be needlessly inundated by the F word. This whole novel takes place over the course of one night, and as it turns out, no one in the cemetery, in this purgatory of sorts, really knows they’re dead. They consider themselves sick or recovering, and each day they crawl back into their “sickboxes” with their literal remains, but for some reason, they don’t understand that they’re dead. And that’s fine. That’s what actually propels this entire novel. You have the spirits knowing they can pass through the undead, can fly through walls, and cannot leave the black gate, but they don’t put two and two together that they’re in a cemetery, dead. So poor Willie, and all of them, really, have to figure that out. It’s actually a kind of cool premise, and once I figured out that was what the story was about, things really started making sense… but there was so much red tape I had to get through to figure out that this is what the novel is about, hence me nearly putting it down for good. For one, I thought this novel was supposed to be about Willie, but he really only plays a very tiny part in this story. I also thought it was supposed to be about Abraham Lincoln attempting to come to terms with the death of his son while the country is in turmoil, but that’s also just a tiny part. Instead, it is about the spirits coming to terms with their lot in life and passing on, which in the end, was kind of beautiful. Yes, this novel was a mess. Even with the audible, I had no idea what was going on sometimes, or why certain characters existed. I was shocked and appalled, grossed out, bored with some of the never-ending historical accounts, but also enamored by the grit of it all, especially when Saunders began sharing the eye witness accounts of people who hated Lincoln and thought he was driving the nation to its end. They were appalled with him, with his throwing of a lavish party while Willie lay upstairs ill, with the Civil War and the brother/fathers/lovers dying for a cause many saw as being frivilous… and reading these brief but poignant accounts from real people who lived during the time was attention grabbing for me, especially when Saunders finally brought in the African-American voices near the conclusion (of which I wish there had been so much more). And in the end, I think there’s a pretty powerful metaphor concerning a spirit that leaves with Lincoln… but you’ll have to read it to see what I mean. When all was finally said and done, I actually found myself having a hard time letting go of the characters and their stories. I felt, not to be cliché, that I was missing a piece of myself. “How can that be?” you might ask? I asked myself the same, especially because I had such a hard time reading this book, let alone enjoying it. I’m not sure, but part of me connected with this book, and the other part wanted to run away from it screaming. In the end, this is a book that needs to be studied; I didn’t get it all the first time, and I certainly didn’t enjoy all of it. I probably won’t get it all the second time I read it, nor the third. And that, I believe, is what gives it “umpfh.” It’s a rich text, confusing as they come, but rich nonetheless, and while certainly not one I’d hand my highschoolers for the above-mentioned shock value peppering (that adds nothing to the story), it’s one I will someday, in the far distant future, pick up again and re-read, because there’s more to this than meets the eye/ear/senses.

I've never read anything quite like this. George Saunders has created something truly original - a novel told entirely through voices of ghosts in a graveyard, centered around Abraham Lincoln grieving his young son Willie. The format is unusual and takes a few pages to adjust to - it's written almost like a play or oral history, with dozens of different voices speaking in short bursts. But once I got into the rhythm, I couldn't put it down. The chorus of spirits, each stuck in their own denial about being dead, creates this haunting, darkly comic atmosphere. What makes this so powerful is how Saunders weaves Lincoln's historical grief with these invented supernatural voices. The president's visits to his son's crypt become this meditation on love, loss, and letting go. I found myself crying multiple times, which I didn't expect from such an experimental novel. The historical interludes grounding the story in real accounts of Lincoln's life add weight and authenticity. It's ambitious, moving, strange, and completely unforgettable. Not for everyone - the format will turn some readers off - but if you're willing to meet it on its own terms, it's absolutely brilliant. One of the most original novels I've read in years.

You can tell that this is an unusual novel by the distribution of reviews across Amazon’s stars. The reviews by professional literary critics are universally positive, but the response from those of us who are amateurs is much more varied. The story is rooted in historic fact: President Lincoln’s beloved son Willie died in the White House from typhoid, and the grieving president made several visits to his son’s crypt. This is a strange story, strangely told. I am familiar with the word bardo from Eliot Pattison’s mysteries which are steeped in Buddhism and set in Tibet. Other people are more qualified to discuss whether this fictional setting is more consistent theologically with a Buddhist bardo, with limbo, with purgatory, or with none of them. Whatever the theology is, this bardo is not heavenly. This bardo is heavily populated with spirits or ghosts of people buried in the cemetery who have not moved on to whatever their next state of being is to be. The structure of this novel is unusual. It is told almost entirely in dialogue. The dialogue sometimes is from first person “historic” accounts of true events related to Lincoln or his son’s death, complete with citations that give the appearance of contemporaneous sources. ( “Historic” is in quotes because apparently some of those accounts are authentic and some are fictional.) Some of the dialogue is in the thoughts of living characters such as Lincoln and the cemetery caretaker. But the majority of the story is told in dialogue between the spirits. Some readers find it tedious and some find it brilliant. I appreciate the creativity and had no difficulty following the story. Despite the fact that it was so effective as storytelling, it was disconcerting to shift point of view so frequently. The result of the frequent jumps was that I felt less connected to the story. This is a sad story of loss, of love, of regret, of grief and of pain. There are some very disturbing aspects, some heartwarming moments, and some humor. Among the disturbing aspects are the plight of children in the spirit world, the suffering of the spirits from mistreatment as slaves, and the survival of hatred and racism past death. The portrayal of Lincoln is poignant and sympathetic. He is shown as President, father, and husband. The main spirit characters tell their stories of life and of their afterlives. They work together to reach the president and save Willie’s spirit. Love it or hate it, this is a book worth reading for its story and for the technical aspects of how the story is told. This was a book group book and it was a good selection for us. It lead to a very interesting and broad reaching discussion. It is a book that I could appreciate, but not a book that I could love.

Where to start? I love George Saunders and have read just about everything, including his kids books. I could barely get through this one. Like another reviewer said, I agree with The Atlantic review of this, mostly. And unlike what a lot of folks have said, I did not find this touching, endearing, or filled with pathos. I did not find it a stunning portrayal of a father and president’s loss. It’s a frustrating, bewildering read - like watching a beloved teacher fall to his death down a long flight of stairs while dressed, inexplicably, in a clown suit and then slamming to his final rest on a whoopie cushion that emits a loud fart noise to a stunned audience. Did we just witness something terrible, hilarious, rotten, amazing? I have so many questions - mostly WHY? So basically, I found it a disappointing portrayal peppered with absurdity, a circus cast of characters, odd juxtapositions, a mishmash. It’s like the literati kidnapped Saunders to turn a writer into a writer - there was just no need - and it failed. Was it over or under edited? I’m not sure. To me what makes Saunders a genius is his unique understanding of the way capitalism threatens, warps, and harms our humanity. The best of his Everyman characters persist, often holding on to ever smaller shreds of dignity that they must trade to simply exist, never mind function. We feel for them, we see ourselves in them to some extent at least. There is a sense that our collective nostalgia for the way things used to be (or more accurately, the way we thought they used to be) could be used against us and destroy us. Our delusions are in fact deeply harmful. Unvarnished truth and that shrinking humanity is all we’ve got to save us - and the odds ain’t great. This book also deals with such delusions - this time of bardo purgatory, where Willie Lincoln must hear the cold hard truth of his father that Willie is dead, even as Abe founders in his own denial and delusions even forgetting Tad, his living son, for a bit. And we do watch as truth and the difficult acceptance of it eventually frees these characters, just as the acceptance of the horrifying truths of slavery and war for freedom eventually free the living. And Lincoln, the father, is therefore elevated as righteous truth teller… BUT… the absurdist cast of characters, like a Greek chorus of deplorables and the quotes - real and imagined - make this virtually unreadable. It’s like chaotic slapstick or a weird laugh track over a funeral. Idk, maybe I’m being overly harsh. I just had high hopes for another haunting waltz through American delusions with a treatment that affirmed, we are much more than this, and that coming through the bardo to the other side means something after all.

Any writer can break the rules of our craft. If he does it poorly the resulting pieces remain at our feet and the confused reader is left to kick at them unsatisfied, like viewing the aftermath of an accident. But if the writer succeeds, he breaks rules to the point where he actually plants the resulting debris and a new form grows. The reader takes in the nascent creation with either bewilderment and possible dislike or sheer wonder. From the comments I’ve consumed about Lincoln in the Bardo, readers report from both viewpoints. Here’s my take. I started on the bewilderment side and ended this book in wonder. George Saunders’s debut novel is set in a time of upheaval, the early days of the Civil War, when the country was only beginning to realize the horrible depths it was careening toward. President Lincoln’s young son Willie, age eleven, takes ill and dies. His body is placed in a crypt in a cemetery populated by a whole community of less than restful souls. But one night Lincoln, burdened by worry and grief, feels impelled to return to the tomb to visit his lost child. What he leaves with and how he does so is a striking fulfillment of this tale. Here’s where the rule-breaking comes in: The story is told at a distance, through the observations of the dead souls and through historical source material Saunders uses abundantly though I couldn’t tell which of these many footnotes were based on real material and what was imagined. Fiction craft lessons often teach writers to create characters who are active, not passive, and who can bring urgency to the narrative while at the same time inciting emotion, positive or negative, from the reader. When I began reading Lincoln in the Bardo, I was skeptical. I didn’t see how Saunders could conjure urgency, action, or emotion when the main character, President Lincoln, is for the most part a quiet, introspective, grieving presence and everyone else, a host of strangers without historical significance, was dead. My curiosity kept me reading and I’m glad I did because Saunders succeeds in all this and that is the miracle of the book. I won’t say how he creates urgency, but I will speak a little on the emotional aspect. At first I wasn’t interested in these ancillary characters. They spend a lot of time talking, stating their cases, and telling their own death stories. They rarely listen other than to appraise another person’s situation and compare whether they are better or worse off than the other. I kept wanting to get back to Lincoln: Where is he? What’s he doing? But there came a pivotal scene, which I won’t reveal here, where that situation changes and I realized or recognized something I can only describe using the lyrics from John Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus”: “I am he as you are he as you are me/ And we are all together…” They are us. These characters represent all of us. The scene provides a kind of light for the lost souls and one character, Mr. Vollman, observes, “My God, what a thing! To find oneself thus expanded!” These souls are essentially seeking, as we who are living are also seeking, a sense of connection—a certain wholeness. How they come to it is one of the most touching parts of the narrative. Their realization opens the world for them and, for me, turned the book into a profound statement of empathy, compassion, and what it means to be human. As a reader I felt moved; as a writer I felt delight over what the author had accomplished. I wanted to read the book again, immediately, so I could better understand and appreciate how Saunders, with such expert craftsmanship and many twists and turns, had built the book. Writers read for enjoyment, yes, but we also read to learn what art is possible to craft from our tools, which range from basic words and sentences to scintillating, airborne imagination. With Lincoln in the Bardo, an impressive demonstration of skill and imagination, Saunders, simply put, shows a new way of presenting a story. I hope he inspires many writers to let loose in mind and spirit, and see what we can share in our own ongoing quests, acknowledged or not, for wholeness.

I found this novel a bit difficult to follow at first, but once I understood who the characters were and how the dynamics worked, I found myself deeply involved with the story and characters. It's probably one of the most moving novels I have read in the past year. The Bardo is place between life and death, where people have to come to terms (or not) with mortality. I don't want to say more because I don't want to spoil the story, but I found it quite a human and humane story. Definitely worth reading.

This novel is probably not for everyone, but I loved it. I enjoyed the chaotic dialogue of the 'sick' characters, their interrupting each other, the disorderly descriptions of each other, sort of stream of consciousness inner thinking. I also can't say why, but having each character 'sign' his/ her contribution also really worked. It didn't read like a play, exactly, but rather like testimony. I am sure there are better comparisons which I haven't read, but it reminded me of 'Under Milkwood' and naturally 'Our town'. I enjoyed the historical accounts (be they true or false) of Lincoln in those terrible days, their variety reminding the reader of how difficult it is to pin down the reality of things, but also to reflect on history in general, and on what we have accepted as true. I have never considered how Lincoln's personal loss might have altered the way in which he approached his presidency and the war, so I was glad for that new perspective as well. The letters damning Lincoln for the war, for the deaths it incurred, articulate the voices, the victims of war, that make you ask the old question why does history repeat itself? Why don't we learn? Saunder's rendering of the slave 'shards' inner-thinking and reactions also convinced me, as did the image of Abe Lincoln accompanied by the spirit of a former slave seeking the everyday, taken-for-granted freedom enjoyed by whites. Lincoln's words to his dead son are heart-breaking, as is the exploration of guilt feelings traversed by the bereft parents. I begged another reader I know not to tell me her impressions, as I was just starting the book, reading it with great enthusiasm, and alarmed by her poorly hidden disgust with the work. I think she (Greek, old school communist) didn't care for an American story in which Lincoln was a tarnished character, found (as a doting grandma to lively twin boys) the death of Willie abhorrant, and had no patience with occasional transmogrification.

I had been slightly resistant to reading George Saunders' Booker Prize-winning Lincoln In The Bardo, because I'd seen quite a lot of slightly smug comments about it on social media in which people said 'Of course, it's challenging - but so rewarding' as if reading an experimental novel is somehow like getting your Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award or volunteering in Chad, and everyone should congratulate you for it. And also, while I've no problem with novels that experiment with form, I don't think it should come at the expense of plot and character. Fortunately, though, Lincoln In The Bardo is really not a particularly difficult read. It's told through the voices of over 100 characters, who will sometimes speak for several pages, sometimes only for a few words. Sometimes sentences are split between two characters, with one breaking off halfway through to handover to another. However, the characters with the most to say are so immediately engaging that the unusual way in which the narrative is constructed very soon starts to feel perfectly natural. The story is set during the American Civil War and deals with the death at the White House of Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son, Willie, while his parents host an extravagant party downstairs. Distraught, Lincoln visits the cemetery crypt alone at night to visit his son's body. Unbeknownst to him, the cemetery is inhabited by spirits trapped in the 'bardo', which appears to be akin to some sort of limbo between this world and the next and from which they are reluctant or unable to move on due to a sort of denial that they are dead at all. Coffins to them are only 'sick-boxes' and dead bodies are 'sick-forms', while the spirits themselves take on bizarre and grotesque appearances that the living cannot see. Concerned for poor Willie Lincoln and fearing that he too will be trapped in the bardo - a terrible fate for a child - if his father can't achieve some sort of closure and let him go, the spirits take it upon themselves to help Lincoln come to terms with Willie's death and therefore to help Willie's soul move on and find peace. Interspersed with all this are the personal testimonies of the spirits themselves and brief digressions in which they talk about their own lives and experiences. Our primary narrators are Vollman, a printer killed in a workplace accident before he could finally consummate his marriage to his much younger wife; Bevins, a gay man who took his own life after being rejected by his lover; and the Reverend Everly Thomas, who is convinced he will be damned if he leaves the bardo but can't - for reasons unclear - articulate why. Vollman and Bevins are a charming double act, while the Reverend is an altogether more ambiguous but fascinating figure, and the myriad voices of the other spirits add many extra layers of perspective and historical detail to the story - soldiers, slaves, paupers, society beauties, they're all here. Also scattered through the story are short extracts from biographies, eyewitness accounts, letters and histories of Lincoln, some real, some created by Saunders. Some are enlightening, some contradictory, some judgmental (sometimes heartbreakingly so) and I felt they also provided a break from the intensity of the voices of the spirits and gave the story some grounding beyond the supernatural realm of the main narrative. What you won't get from this book, though, is much detail about Lincoln himself; this isn't a biographical novel at all and Lincoln as a character is actually a peripheral one. Dealing as it does with the death of a child, a grieving father and some characters with some deeply troubled backgrounds, Lincoln In The Bardo is sometimes deeply sad, although never sentimental. But it's also far more funny than you might expect, and some of the most touching moments don't involve Lincoln and Willie at all. This is an unusual novel, and it certainly won't be to everyone's taste - reader reviews seem very much divided regarding the style and structure - but it is absolutely not the challenging slog some have suggested it to be. In fact, it's a simple story, but cleverly and unusually told, and the realm of the bardo and its inhabitants are so vividly rendered, the voices of each character so personal and immediate, that I found this an immersive and genuinely gripping read.

Com estrutura diferente de qualquer outro romance e narrado por vozes diversas, essa é uma história profundamente tocante (e por vezes muito divertida) sobre amor e perda, sobre aceitação da própria finitude e da finitude de quem amamos. Uma leitura deliciosa e impactante.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders is a daring, emotionally restrained, and quietly profound novel about grief, responsibility, and moral endurance. It's set over a single night in 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln visits the crypt of his young son Willie, who has died during a typhoid outbreak while the American Civil War is entering its bloodiest phase. From this spare historical premise, Saunders constructs a chorus of voices (spirits lingering in the “bardo”, a Tibetan Buddhist concept of an in-between state) who observe, interrupt, misremember, and refract Lincoln’s private sorrow. The novel is part historical fiction, part metaphysical meditation. Quotations from 19th-century sources (some authentic, some invented) are woven into a fragmented, almost documentary structure. The dead narrate the living; the marginal speak more than the powerful. Lincoln himself appears only intermittently, yet his presence dominates the book. His grief isn't theatrical. It is heavy, restrained, and morally consequential. Saunders’ style places the novel in conversation with writers like William Faulkner (polyphonic voices), Virginia Woolf (interiority), and Thornton Wilder (the dead reflecting on the living). Yet Lincoln in the Bardo is distinctly his own book: compassionate without sentimentality, experimental without obscurity, and morally serious without preaching. Set in early 1862, the novel captures a nation at its breaking point. Lincoln’s personal loss mirrors a collective catastrophe in which hundreds of thousands of young men will die. The book implicitly asks a harrowing question: how does a leader continue to send other men’s sons into war while mourning his own child? Saunders never answers this directly; but the tension is the novel’s moral engine... The portrait of Lincoln here is strikingly countercultural. He isn't defined by bravado, dominance, or emotional suppression. Instead, Saunders presents masculinity as grounded in duty, compassion, self-command, and moral endurance. Pro-social traits on display include: - Emotional honesty without self-indulgence: Lincoln allows himself to grieve deeply, but he doesn't make his pain the centre of the world. - Burden-bearing responsibility: He absorbs sorrow so that the work (preserving the Union, ending slavery) can continue. - Empathy extended outward: Even in grief, Lincoln’s concern is not only for his son, but for the countless other sons who will die. - Restraint and dignity: His masculinity is quiet, internal, and oriented toward service rather than recognition. For men and boys, Lincoln in the Bardo offers a powerful corrective to both emotional repression and performative vulnerability. It models a mature masculinity that: => Accepts suffering as part of responsibility, not as an excuse to withdraw. => Treats grief as something to be carried with meaning, not broadcast for validation. => Places private pain in service of a larger moral purpose. => Understands leadership as sacrifice rather than self-expression. This isn't a book about winning, conquering, or posturing. It's about endurance, conscience, and love under unbearable weight. In an era that often caricatures masculinity as either toxic or fragile, this novel reminds us that some of the most admirable male virtues are quiet ones: steadfastness, compassion, and the willingness to carry sorrow so others may live. Lincoln in the Bardo is a demanding novel, but also a humane and deeply instructive one.