Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
I revisited this masterpiece again this year. In an interview, George Saunders explained that he once read the true story about Lincoln visiting his son’s crypt late in the night. In his grief, Lincoln pulled the coffin from the vault, opened it, and caressed his son’s body. Saunders said the story stuck with him for years and he felt he had to share it in some form which eventually became this novel.
It’s an unconventional way of telling a story, but at the same time so engaging. Colson Whitehead explained in his NYTimes review, “Readers with conservative tastes may (foolishly) be put off by the novel’s form — it is a kind of oral history, a collage built from a series of testimonies consisting of one line or three lines or a page and a half, some delivered by the novel’s characters, some drawn from historical sources. The narrator is a curator, arranging disparate sources to assemble a linear story. It may take a few pages to get your footing, depending.”
To me, in some ways it reads like a play, interspersed with actual historical accounts and a wonderful incarnation of fascinating characters. I’m most struck by the heart of the piece and it is one I will likely revisit again. — MJD
Summary:
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.
Every book you buy here does more than tell a story—it helps change one.
I earn a small commission through Bookshop.org, and 100% of those proceeds support my work in Ethiopia with Friends of Homacho, funding clean water, schools, and hope where it’s needed most.