When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small affiliate commission. George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo is the 2017 Man Booker prizewinning work of fiction, inspired by the true story of a president’s display of sorrow.The most salient aspect of the book is the cacophonous chorus of narrators whose words build the bardoin Tibetan Buddhism, the space between this life and the next.

Unfolding over one night in a graveyard not far from the White House, it tells a story. Whether you'll recognize all of them, though, depends on your ear. George Saunders’ first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is remarkable let’s get that out of the way first. It's not just the Lincolns of the world who want their grievances and triumphs to be acknowledged in Bardo, every ghost clamors to be recognized. The apologies they're awaiting will remain unsaid, the weddings unconsummated, the experiences unlived. While those kinds of tics and predilections are obvious in writing, though, such things can be hard to hear the audiobook avoids those pitfalls by treating the book like the script it is.Įvery script has to end, of course, and toward the end of Lincoln in the Bardo, young Willie Lincoln breaks the news to the graveyard’s residents: They’re dead.

To make their voices stand out in the book, Saunders uses his signature particularity: One character has an obsessive concern, another repeats the same phrase, a third always misuses certain punctuation. But the majority of the characters are ordinary people who died with unfinished business-a farmer with daddy issues, or a fastidious couple in which both people refuse to take blame for leaving the fireplace grate open. Some of these characters had unusually inopportune departures: Hans Vollman, played by Offerman, died immediately before consummating his marriage Roger Bevins III, played by Sedaris, changed his mind mid-suicide.

I've done this before on a smaller scale, but never something so unrelenting.

Lincoln in the bardo book review