Francis Hodge, an older slave woman whose dignified mien is contrasted by her missing feet and hands. Litzie Wright is a strikingly beautiful young black woman, always mute, dressed in a simple shift with bloody handprints on her hips. The only ghosts that can pass through the cemetery's boundaries, ironically, are the spirits of slaves buried in a mass grave just outside the fence. Some of the ghosts are comic relief, notably Eddie and Betsy Baron, a married couple of roistering, foul-mouthed drunks: 'We was low and fell lower.' Others are heartbreaking. Some manifestations are touching, like the woman followed by orbs with images of the children she left behind some are terrible. Bivens, so sensitive to the world's beauty, has a mouth, eyes and hands that multiply as he speaks, sometimes covering his body. Vollman, for example, 'manifests' naked, with an enormously swollen penis (where the beam fell). So why are they hanging around the bardo? Part of the pleasure of this book for the reader is figuring that out, gathering clues to the rules that apply in this little land of the dead, and I won't give too much away.īut we learn that they see one another, and that their appearances are shaped or warped by their experiences in life and death. Saunders lifts it into the realm of fiction, and eventually transcendence. That much is historical account, reported in newspapers at the time. He removed the body from the casket and held it.

Willie was 'the sort of child people imagine their children will be, before they have children,' bright, affectionate and self-possessed.Īfter the boy's body was placed in a crypt in a Washington, D.C., cemetery, Lincoln came alone, at night, to mourn. The boy died, probably of typhoid fever, at age 11, and Lincoln and his wife, Mary, were beside themselves with grief. That story takes place in 1862, immediately after the death of Lincoln's beloved son Willie.

But Saunders is not writing a religion textbook here he uses the bardo as a starting point to tell a moving story. The 'bardo' of the title is a term from Tibetan Buddhism that refers to a transitional state for souls after death as they await their next incarnation. Lincoln in the Bardo was an exception, because I couldn't put it down, reading it in a single afternoon. As a full-time book critic, I rarely read a single book straight through, because I'm always shifting among several.

Saunders says he didn't set out to write a novel (see interview, L), but readers can be glad he did. Lincoln in the Bardo, his first novel, is a showcase for all of those qualities.

Lincoln in the bardo review