Lincoln in the Bardo

Speaking of authors who combine stylistic daring with profound emotion, I give you George Saunders. Saunders’s strange and funny stories prompted me to try my hand at writing fiction, and his first novel is one of my favorite books.

Inspired by the true story of Abraham Lincoln sneaking, on multiple occasions, into a Washington D.C. crypt to cradle the corpse of his young son, Willie, this book also breathes life into a sizeable cast of ghosts squatting in the “Bardo”—a liminal space between life and death. As the American Civil War rages, President Lincoln and the unwilling ghosts must all… show more.

I honestly think this is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read.

In writing about haunting, I always confront the question of what pins ghosts to the living world. I loved the poignancy of Saunders’s ghosts and the desperate denial of their own deaths that they cling to.

I have a special love of books written in a multiplicity of voices; the way Saunders writes his ghostly chorus is so virtuosic it took my breath away. 

I loved this novel because it was haunting, historical, and existential with an experimental format that blew my mind almost like an intense meditation session.

While some people may find the experimental format jarring, it transported me to a surreal disorienting dimension similar to a dream or bardo state. If you’re not familiar with the Bardo, it’s worth researching.

The word Bardo in the title is what originally attracted me to the novel because of my interest in Buddhism. Yet the bardo in this novel reminded me more of Dante’s Inferno!

The technique used at the beginning to establish the… show more.

If you’ve ever looked at a picture of Abraham Lincoln and wondered why he looked so sad, you may find your answer here. He faced an almost insurmountable challenge and mourned the potentially fatal division of his country, it is true. But the death of his young son compounded that grief. Before reading this book, I had never heard of a ‘Bardo,’ and I’m still not convinced of its existence, except as a psychological state. But as a bereaved parent myself, I could understand Lincoln’s need to hold onto the memory of his dead son a little while longer. If… show more.

Lincoln in the Bardo is a compelling, harrowing novel about our greatest American political leader, and probably one of our greatest poets as well. Abraham Lincoln, in raw grief at the death of his beloved son Willie, soars in his humanity and intelligence, and resolve above the strange but beautiful world of this novel—a kind of transitional place between life and death. No book about politics has captured so well the tangled web of the personal and the political in a complex world.

The power of the spectral afterworld in this novel convinced me to cast my novel about John… show more.

Persevere with this book. I had trouble with its unorthodox structure and convoluted opening, and almost gave up. But this complex novel is worth the struggle, and yielded deeper emotional impact upon a second reading. The inhabitants of Oak Hill Cemetery are confused and distorted spirits trapped in bardo, a Buddhist term for the shadow state between life and death. Unable to acknowledge their actual condition, they retreat to their “sick-boxes” (coffins) during the day and congregate at night. They are joined by the traumatized spirit of a young boy named Willie. When Willie’s father, President Abraham Lincoln, visits in… show more.

What can I say about this incredible, hilarious, deeply moving, formally dazzling mashup of the fantastic and the historical except I would pretty much give my right foot to have written it myself? Set during the days immediately after the death of Abraham Lincoln’s beloved son Willie from typhus in 1862, it is narrated by the spirits of the deceased that surround him in the cemetery. These ghosts are hanging around, it turns out, because they have all failed to make the leap into the unknown of the afterlife, to let go of their attachment to this world. Each has… show more.

This novel famously features a cast of 166 narrators… and not a single one of them has any idea what’s happened to them. Again, it’s a question of self-preservation; they don’t want to know what’s going on, because what’s going on is this: they’re dead. This is not a spoiler. The reader knows the situation from the beginning, and thus the tension in the book is not about our discovery of the truth, but about theirs. This is a powerful and surprisingly uplifting book about trust and acceptance. 

Lincoln in the Bardo is breathtaking. During a single night when Abraham Lincoln visits the tomb of his recently deceased son, his memories and reveries dance together with snippets of contemporary historical commentary and observations by the shades of the disoriented dead. These swirling fragments tease together a touching set of interlocked narratives that you almost feel rather than follow. I was particularly impressed by how Saunders’ mastery of craft holds the book’s fragmentary elements together.