Lincoln in the Bardo: An Intriguing Tale of Grief, Loss and Redemption

TMF: J’ai lu ce texte sans attente et c’était surprenant et très intéressant comme création.
Livraison parfait. Merci.

France on Nov 11, 2023

Cathryn Conroy: Well, this was, um, interesting. And by "interesting," I really mean bizarre, peculiar, and even rather rude and crude in parts. This Booker Prize-winning novel by George Saunders is not an ordinary novel. Read with caution.

The plot, such as it is, is relatively simple. Willy Lincoln, the 11-year-old son of President Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln, died on February 20, 1862 of typhoid fever. The president was so distraught and wracked with anguish that the night of Willy's burial he twice visited the crypt in which the little boy was interred in nearby Georgetown. That's all fact.

In this highly imaginative, albeit horrifying, novel, Willy's spirit goes to the bardo, a kind of purgatory, where he is visited twice by his grief-stricken father, who is also distressingly haunted by the enormous death toll of the Civil War. Even though that's the premise, in some ways it's all background noise to the fever-dream thoughts and ramblings of the bardo's other ghostly inhabitants, who mingle with each other, complain, criticize, and argue. (This is where it gets particularly weird.) It's these souls—a Protestant minister, a lust-filled printer, a...

United States on Mar 26, 2023

giselle agreli melo: Com estrutura diferente de qualquer outro romance e narrado por vozes diversas, essa é uma história profundamente tocante (e por vezes muito divertida) sobre amor e perda, sobre aceitação da própria finitude e da finitude de quem amamos. Uma leitura deliciosa e impactante.

Brazil on May 16, 2022

Sally81: This is one the most wonderful books I have read / heard / experienced in a long time - brilliant, weird, insightful, crass and confusing all at the same time I am still not sure what I think about this book except that I loved it.

I have been meaning to pick this book since November 2017 and I have the physical copy on my shelves since August 2019. I borrowed the audiobook around 16 times before actually reading this. All in all, to say that this was a book I was apprehensive about would be an understatement. I was expecting this mediation on loss and grief which would only help making me depressed too - what I got was something that did talk about grief but also about grace, moving on and life’s absolute absurdity and our delusions - both internal and external.

The first thing that struck me was how funny this was - some parts are comedic and entertaining (especially the main three narrators in the Bardo) but even the constant historical excerpts about the Lincolns made me grin. In the space of a page, the President was accused of being a bad father, a good father, indifferent and grief stricken. We never got to hear from him directly - there...

Canada on Jun 07, 2020

K Hauser-Askalani: No me gustó que pedí que me enviaran todo en un solo envío y se me cobró dos veces

Mexico on Sep 05, 2018

MelwinMelwin: Review on George Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo”

I am indeed pleased to share my review on one of my superlative reads. The plot, set during the American Civil War, revolves on a historical circumstance, the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie Lincoln. And Saunders picks a pinch of history that affirms that the grieve-stricken Lincoln has had a few visits to his son’s tomb to be in the presence of his son. EUREKA! a scintillating new novel is born.

The story is been narrated by a group of spirits or apparitions, who are stuck in a Bardo , a place where people reach who are disfigured by desires they failed to act upon while alive. They are unaware that they have died, referring to the space as their "hospital-yard" and to their coffins as "sick-boxes". Bardo! Yes, our writer brings into light the transitional zone, Tibetans believe it to be a period between the moment one dies and whatever happens after that, a sleep or a trance-state.

W.Y. Evans Wentz in his book “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” elaborates the concept of Bardo, a little further. He talks of three Bardos:

1. CHIKHAI BARDO- Transitional State of the...

India on Apr 08, 2018

Robert L. Bowie, a.k.a. U.R. Bowie: BOOK REVIEW ARTICLE
George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, 2017)

“All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be.” (Roger Bevins III, p. 304)

Okay, so what happens when we die? Writers of fiction have been peering across into that unfathomable abyss from time out of mind. You might even say that this is what great fiction writers do: they look at the grand questions, and especially at immortality, or the lack thereof.
George Saunders’ rather ironic take on the afterlife goes roughly like this: after death some of us get caught up in the fulgurant thing called “the bone-chilling firesound” of the “matterlightblooming phenomenon.” Amidst lots of explosions and smashing to smithereens—imagine something like the shoot-em-up-blow-em-up special effects of Hollywood—this phenomenon transports us off to . . . well, the author never tells us exactly where. Is it a nice place? That’s a good question. At times there are suggestions that it might be fine, but only for the better-behaved of human beings in their fleshy existence, and not even for all of them.

Some of the deceased, so we’re told, resist the...

United States on Jun 10, 2017