5/13/2023 0 Comments Lincoln in the bardo book reviewAnd it’s hard to blame them, since conceding their deaths seems to lead to a heaven or hell as envisioned by Saunders by way of Hieronymus Bosch (“a beast, bloody-handed and long-fanged, wearing a sulfur-colored robe … three women and a bent-backed old man, bearing long ropes of (their own) intestines”). They cannot even say “corpse” (which becomes “sick-form”) or “coffin” (“sick-box”). The ghosts hover here apparently because they aren’t ready to accept their passing. Other than Lincoln himself, a night watchman and a neighbor, all of these characters are dead - but that doesn’t stop them from having a lot to say. “Lincoln in the Bardo” takes place in Oak Hill Cemetery, the Georgetown graveyard where Abraham Lincoln’s young son Willie was buried in 1862. In just such a liminal state we find the characters of this first novel by celebrated short story writer George Saunders. In Tibetan Buddhism, bardo is a transitional state between one life and the next.
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