I was introduced to George Saunders on a list of “smart summer reads” that I found at Cody’s books in Berkeley, California and have loved his books ever since. However, I didn’t make it far the first time I picked up his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. I was turned off by the citations below the statements from every character and I didn’t really know what he was doing. I had not read the jacket cover or anything about the book.
Then I saw Lincoln in the Bardo on several of my library colleagues’ best of 2017 lists and my wife enjoyed it so I gave it another try.
Bardo is a term that comes from Tibetan Buddhism signifying the state of existence in between death and rebirth, but in the book it seems closer to the idea of purgatory. Saunders was inspired to write the novel after reading about Abraham Lincoln making several visits to the crypt to hold the body of his young son Willie who passed away at the age of 11. He started to imagine what that depth of grief must have been like, especially as the casualties of the Civil War started to escalate.
Saunders has no lack of imagination. I recommend taking this sometimes sweet, sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying and sometimes overwhelmingly sad journey into the bardo.