I heard about this book on my beloved podcast, Literary Disco, as they gushed about Saunders, both in general as an acclaimed short form writer, and for this, his debut novel. It tells the real story of the tragic death of Abraham Lincoln’s young son Willie, but veers into the extraordinary as Willie is in a sort of limbo, surrounded by fantastical and verbose ghosts. He is visited by Lincoln in the graveyard, hence the title, and is struggling with whether to stay in this […]
This was a book? I read it. I liked it?
There’s been a lot of talk about Lincoln in the Bardo over the past 18 months or so. It won a lot of awards, for sure. I finally got it from the library and I read it. And I have no idea, honestly, if I liked it or not. I did? There’s a lot going on here. Abraham Lincoln’s youngest son, Willie, has died and been laid to rest in a cemetery in Georgetown. Lincoln is mad with grief and spends the better part of […]
Experimental af and I loved it
When I was home for Christmas, I took the opportunity to extol to my mother the virtues of my local public library and its available online system for ebooks. I demonstrated by showing her my hold list and, as mothers are wont to do, she had comments on several of my selections. My mom is also a vociferous reader and I do greatly value her opinion, but when she described Lincoln In The Bardo as “weird”, she didn’t mean it in a good way and bless […]
‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ Is a Brilliant Novel, But Is It Good?
Lincoln in the Bardo is an “experimental novel” that actually took home the 2017 Man Booker Prize, and it really is the kind of book that critics would love. It’s brilliantly written. It’s smart, and funny, and it is full of pathos, and the premise is brilliant: Basically, the book grew out of a story that Saunders heard about how Abraham Lincoln would return to the crypt of his son Willie after he died of typhoid fever to hold the body. The book is primarily […]
This year’s surprise 5-star book
Guys, I am not going to lie. This novel knocked me over in ways I was not expecting. I had resisted reading Lincoln in the Bardo for months, because I was not sure about how good it would actually be. But when it won the Man Booker Prize (still plenty of shade for the committee to open it up to Americans; guys, we DO have the National Book Award, you know), I caved and put in a library hold. The first twenty pages made me […]
Amusement with a Capital “A”
In the six stories and one novella that make up his debut collection, the inimitable Saunders pokes and prods at the nagging difficulties of living an ordinary life in an utterly insane world. The protagonists of these stories are people who for the most part just want to go about their day and provide for their families without running into too much trouble, but the zaniness and frenetic pace of American life, recognizable as a fractured possible future version of our own, complicate their lives […]