It would likely have been impossible for any book to live up to the hype created for this one. The cover flap uses words like “literary master” and “most original, transcendent moving work yet.” While I’ve never read them, Saunders’s success with short stories made everyone go mad for his first novel before it was ever published. It had been hyped by all of the snooty places I find good books-NPR, Time, The Atlantic, and my coworker Peter. As the night passes, the Bardo’s inhabitants come together as one-for as much as they fear the matterlightblooming phenomenon that heralds a soul’s departure from the Bardo, they know Willie, sweet, innocent Willie, does not belong in this third place.Īs with many other books, I came to Lincoln in the Bardo with exceedingly high expectations.
As Lincoln’s story is told by an overlap of historical sources, the voices of the Bardo rise and fall over one another, setting out a shadowy world of pain, fear, and longing. As Lincoln traverses the graveyard in his grief, the reader comes to know a myriad of souls inhabiting a second layer of the graveyard-those buried there but not yet moved on to what is next. Lincoln in the Bardo unfolds over the course of the night in which President Lincoln buries his beloved son, Willie.
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