George Saunders, the recipient of this year's
Man Booker Prize, has long been known
for his quirky, often comic short stories.
Lincoln in the Bardo, his first novel,
has its share of idiosyncrasies, but thematically it's made of darker, more
soulful stuff. It's narrated by a host of characters who've been banished to
the "bardo," a Buddhist term for a kind of purgatory, and a key
figure is President Abraham Lincoln, who keeps returning to a cemetery to visit
the grave of his recently deceased son. The novel is a pleasure for the variety
of personal stories, but it's the "broken, awed, humbled, diminished"
Lincoln himself—who can't reconcile his private grief with his
despair over the ongoing Civil War—that makes this book "
a
devastating fable for our own time."
