Monday, February 13, 2017

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders


This moving story unfolds in a graveyard over the course of a single night.  The Civil War is less than a year old--the fighting has just begun in earnest.  President Lincoln's beloved eleven year old son, Willie, dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery.  From this, Saunders spins a story of love and loss using a panorama of voices (living and dead, historical and invented) asking us how we manage to live and love when everything we love must end? I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it.  Beautiful, strange, elegiac, and quite astonishing (with exquisite writing), and yet at times I felt completely adrift.  This book just has to be experienced.


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