Lincoln in the Bardo (Saunders) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
The hype surrounding the book’s release is well deserved: this is a wildly imaginative story of Abraham Lincoln’s near paralyzing grief over the death of his youngest son. Saunders then deftly unites that personal grief with the grief of an entire nation in the throes of civil war.  READ MORE.
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers


Saunders's short stories…tend to vacillate between two impulses: satire and black comedy, reminiscent of Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut; and a more empathetic mode, closer to [Sherwood] Anderson and William Trevor. Though there are moments of dark humor in some of the ghost stories here, Bardo definitely falls into the more introspective part of that spectrum. In these pages, Saunders's extraordinary verbal energy is harnessed, for the most part, in the service of capturing the pathos of everyday life…. Saunders's novel is at its most potent and compelling when it is focused on Lincoln: a grave, deeply compassionate figure, burdened by both personal grief and the weight of the war, and captured here in the full depth of his humanity. In fact, it is Saunders's beautifully realized portrait of Lincoln—caught at this hinge moment in time, in his own personal bardo, as it were—that powers this book over its more static sections and attests to the author's own fruitful transition from the short story to the long-distance form of the novel.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


[A]n extended national ghost story, an erratically funny and piteous seance of grief. [T]he Bardo...refers to an intermediate plane between our world and the next…. [The book] seems at first a clever clip-job, an extended series of brief quotations from letters, diaries, newspaper articles, personal testimonies....  Lincoln in the Bardo teaches us how to read it. The quotations gathered from scores of different voices begin to cohere into a hypnotic conversation…. Stirred heavily into the mix…are dead people…corpses in Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery.... Saunders’s deep compassion shines…[i]n the darkness of that cemetery, [as] the president realizes…his own grief has already been endured by tens of thousands of fathers and mothers across the country.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Ingenious…Saunders—well on his way toward becoming a twenty-first-century Twain—crafts an American patchwork of love and loss, giving shape to our foundational sorrows.
Vogue


The novel beats with a present-day urgency—a nation at war with itself, the unbearable grief of a father who has lost a child, and a howling congregation of ghosts, as divided in death as in life, unwilling to move on.
Vanity Fair
 

A brilliant, Buddhist reimagining of an American story of great loss and great love…. Saunders has written an unsentimental novel of Shakespearean proportions, gorgeously stuffed with tragic characters, bawdy humor, terrifying visions, throat-catching tenderness, and a galloping narrative, all twined around the luminous cord connecting a father and son and backlit by a nation engulfed in fire.
Elle
 

(Starred review.) Saunders’s mesmerizing historical novel is also a moving ghost story. A Dantesque tour through a Georgetown cemetery…[where] Abraham Lincoln visits the grave of his recently interred 11-year-old son, Willie.… [A] haunting American ballad that will inspire increased devotion among Saunders’s admirers.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) A stunningly powerful work, both in its imagery and its intense focus on death, this remarkable work of historical fiction gives an intimate view of 19th-century fears and mores through the voices of the bardo's denizens. —Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Among Saunders' most essential insights is that, in his grief over Willie, Lincoln began to develop a hard-edged empathy, out of which he decided that "the swiftest halt to the [war] (therefore the greatest mercy) might be the bloodiest."…Saunders asserts a complex and disturbing vision in which society and cosmos blur.
Kirkus Reviews