Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

 
published 2017

 
 



[The dead souls in the cemetery are talking about Abraham Lincoln]


XLV
 
 
There was a touch of prairie about the fellow.

hans vollman

Yes

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Like stepping into a summer barn late at night

hans vollman

Or a musty plains office, where some bright candle still burns.

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Vast. Windswept. New. Sad.

hans vollman

Spacious. Curious. Doom-minded. Ambitious.

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Back slightly out.

hans vollman

Right boot chafing.

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commentary: Whatever else 2017 may hold, it looks like being a good year for books. I read this in January, and think that it will certainly be one of the best books I read this year, quite likely the best. It is a most extraordinary work, and one that does not resemble any other book I have ever read. I think I have to start with the publishers’ description:

February 1862. The Civil War rages while President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son is gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns 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 -- called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo.

In fact the word bardo doesn’t appear in the body of the book at all (I had to look it up after I’d finished reading it).

The particularly unusual feature of the book is that it is told in maybe a hundred different voices, often just a few sentences at a time. The souls of the dead in the cemetery push the story along, while telling about their own lives. These sections are interspersed with short quotations from biographical and political books about the Lincoln presidency, which so far as I can tell are all real.

I didn’t know what to expect when I started reading, but I was captured and enthralled within a couple of pages. The throngs of dead souls become real and distinct as they move around the cemetery; the story of Lincoln’s grief is also real, and affecting. The interspersed passages show again that our grasp of facts is unreliable (people can’t even agree on what colour eyes Lincoln has) and that even when their son had died the Lincolns’ behavior could be discussed and criticized; they could be blamed for their son’s death. (And you thought that was a new thing…?)

It is a sad book but not at all depressing, and is often very very funny.

So difficult to quote from Lincoln in the Bardo – I worry that the extract above will look off-putting rather than the marvel it is. You quickly get used to the style, and then it is a very easy read: it is simple and straightforward. I couldn’t always work out exactly what was going on, but that didn’t matter.

A line like

We were perhaps not so unlovable as we had come to believe.

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can completely catch you with its straightforwardness.

Even though it is a book about dead souls, it is full of warmth and light and good nature: it is, it seemed to me, about the ultimate lovability of human beings, and their attempts to attain goodness despite all the bad things we cannot pretend don’t exist within us and outside us. I would say it could only have been written by someone with a very good heart.

It is astounding.

Picture of Abraham Lincoln from the Smithsonian.

Photograph from the Library of Congress shows Willie Lincoln (left), who died Feb. 20, 1862, age eleven, and his younger brother Tad (Thomas), posed with their mother's nephew, Lockwood Todd, in Mathew Brady's studio in Washington, D.C.