A Review: Lincoln in the Bardo
Title of Work: Lincoln in the Bardo
Author: George Saunders
Format:
Published: 2017
Started:
Finished: 2022-11-05\
Posted: Goodreads
Rating: 4/5
What the hell is a bardo? Well, it’s not quite heaven or hell but adjacent in a way. Bardo is a Tibetan Buddhist tenet for the space between death and reincarnation. A sort of purgatory where souls linger after exiting their earthly bodies but before descending again into the land of the living. Lincoln in the Bardo (LITB) is an experimental—perhaps avant garde would be an appropriate categorization—novel in which George Saunders (GS) takes a true, classic American historical tragedy, the White House death of Abe Lincoln’s son Willy, and sends it spinning into the realm of the ethereal, the ghoulish, the spiritual. GS sends us spinning too, wildly through a mixture of genuine historical accounts extracted from the letters and publications of Lincoln’s contemporaries and made-up details from pseudo-biographers of his own design. I don’t typically care for the sorts of stories that take a true historical event or character as the base for a whimsical or supernatural revisionist biography. The… ambitious film Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter comes to mind. However, I think GS’s efforts here to fuck around with conventional expectations of novel structure while blending Eastern and Western beliefs about what might happen after we die are well worth the heaping praise he has received if nothing else for the will to innovate and take risks with a form so often relegated to the formulaic and the traditional. We, the readers or listeners, receive this tale from a cast of narrators that is as unpredictable as it is vast (seriously, the audio book is voice acted by a cast of like 30 of your favorite actors). They layer over, inside, on top of each other and their efforts sometimes overlap into a chaotic cacophony, unrestricted by the boundaries and physical laws of those of us whose souls remain bound to fleshy vessels for the time being.
I’ll admit I was a bit overwhelmed and confused at first. Some of my early notes and updates from this audio book listen pertained to my doubts about the structure and viability of this tale as an audiobook. I couldn’t tell who the hell was talking, if they were talking about the “current” time and place of Lincoln, the bardo realm existing outside of but often meddling with physical reality, or the periods these spectral narrators originated from before death which were often periods very far removed from the main narrative timeline. I tell you all this about my initial struggles as a heads up and hopefully as some comfort that it’s okay to be confused for a bit. I think it’s supposed to feel confusing and loud and like we can’t tell where all of these disembodied voices are coming from. Because we can’t. But it all comes together nicely and I ended up really enjoying this one. Gold star for you again GS.
Oh yeah, there’s also lots of poop and dick and butt and sex humor. The really funny immature kind. So if you’re into that, this one should be right up your back alley.