Quick Review – 3.5 stars
- This is one of the most creative stories I have ever read.
- Main characters were well developed with the exception of Willy Lincoln.
- Style was hard to get used to since it jumped back and forth between what seemed like historical excerpts and multiple first person narrative.
- There were few errors.
- Accuracy is difficult to assess without research into what was real history and what was made up and presented as real.
Full Review
The story in this book is a bit scattered between the former lives of the three main narrators and the historical backdrop. When one begins reading, one expects that Abe Lincoln will be the focus. The Lincoln in the bardo is Willy, Abe and Mary’s recently deceased eleven-year-old son. Very little of the narrative comes from the child’s perspective.
The creative brilliance of this book is the author’s conception of the bardo as a graveyard, a place of purgatory like existence in which the inhabitants don’t know they are dead. That knowledge is avoided at all costs by the ghosts who suspect the truth. It has been compared to the Spoon River Anthology.
The story has a rich sense of Civil War era life from the perspective of the average man. The three main narrators are all regular people, anyman of their time. Other inhabitants of the graveyard chime in from time to time which gives the story a rich tapestry of daily life. However, the sexual aspects are overemphasized to the detriment of the story. One character has a perpetual erection that is discussed in detail multiple times much to my annoyance though I am no prude.
Most of the inhabitants of the graveyard are of the lower classes and the writer includes African-American residents. This was clearly to make the point of the racist society being present even in death. It seemed a bit of an afterthought and though pertinent it was underdeveloped as a theme as were the gender issues that were touched on. I will not criticize this too much though as it might have added unnecessary length to the story and hijacked its focus.
As a reader, you want to know how the people died and came to be in the bardo. This hold true for not only the main characters and but the minor ones. George Saunders uses this device to create interest and tension throughout the story. You get the sense that there is so much more to each resident, he could write forever. This did sometimes derail the focus.
For a book with Lincoln in the title, little time was spent inside the heads of the Lincolns themselves, either Abe or Willy. We see Abe through other characters eyes and this device creates a bit of distance which lessened the emotional impact for the reader.
The switch back and forth between the historical accounts and the character narrative was a bit jarring. In fiction it is normal to make things up but the way the “historical” accounts were presented gave the reader the impression that they were accurate from actual sources. I learned that some were fictional and I found that deceptive. I didn’t research to find out which ones were the author’s imagination since I did not want to spend that much time on the book.
This was another book I read because my sister, who keeps up with the NY Times bestseller list, prompted me to do so. The good thing about currently popular books is that they can often be borrowed from the public library for free in physical, electronic, or even audio format. This wasn’t one I would have bought otherwise. All in all I enjoyed it but felt like the book tried to do too much. It was conceptually out of the ordinary and that was refreshing, but historically it was of limited value to my research.
Links to Amazon to purchase –
Civil War Book Blog 