Very slow start but I at least finished one book this year!
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 returned 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, 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.
Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination
and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential
writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply
concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s
ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really
matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a
kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices—living and dead, historical
and invented—to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and
love when we know that everything we love must end?
