Goodreads lincoln in the bardo5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() “Bardo” is the Tibetan Buddhist name for a transition period between death and rebirth and seems to indicate, in this case, the bizarre purgatory inhabited by these ghosts. Saunders intercuts facts and semi-facts (culled from books and news accounts) in a collage-like narrative with some ghost stories of his own imagining, allowing a chorus of disembodied spirits to describe Lincoln’s visits, while babbling on about their own regrets and misplaced dreams. 20, 1862, and the grief-stricken president’s visits to the crypt where his son was interred at the Oak Hill Cemetery in nearby Georgetown. “Lincoln in the Bardo” takes, as its jumping-off point, the death of Abraham Lincoln’s beloved 11-year-old son, Willie, who succumbed to typhoid fever on Feb. ![]() And then, to make things stranger, populate the rest of the scene with some Edward Gorey-style ghosts, skittering across the landscape - at once menacing, comical and slightly tongue-in-cheek. Add a tall, sad mourner, grieving over his recently deceased son. Picture, as a backdrop, one of those primitively drawn 19th-century mourning paintings with rickety white gravestones and age-worn monuments standing under the faded green canopy of a couple of delicately sketched trees. George Saunders’s much-awaited first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” is like a weird folk art diorama of a cemetery come to life. LINCOLN IN THE BARDO By George Saunders 343 pages. ![]()
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