I have no doubt that "Lincoln in the Bardo" is an outstanding book. One of those that remind us of that wonderful feeling with comes from communing with perfect literature. It's one of those books you read with the knowledge that you read something not so good but perfect. Due to the lack of appropriate words, I have a feeling that this is the literature with the big "L". The stranger fact is that when it's over and it comes to writing why it was so good, it can not be described.
George Saunders book takes a historical fact as its starting point. During Lincoln presidency, his sons died on typhus. Lincoln, as it was reported by the then newspapers, after the funeral went to the cemetery again, alone. He enter the tomb in which his son lay and actually took his body out of the coffin, we would not know it for sure. But this vision - Lincoln holding his son in his arms - as Saunders himself tells, was for him a starting point for the story. Does this mean that it is a novel about the death of a son? Not necessarily. Again, referring to Saunders - it is certainly a story about a man who's son died, although the fact that this man is the president of the United States is somewhat secondary. Though not necessarily because of the completely fictional characters (although if you can see from reading Lincoln, it is also a work of fiction and certainly narrative) that kind of story could not be told.
The plot is seemingly simple enough. Here, during one night, in the elementary, gathered ghosts or souls of those who died but did not go further - watch the president's suffering, and the pain that stays in this place between (Bardo is according to Buddhist beliefs such a place in between) makes Lincoln sons spirit, who, like other children, should move on quickly, because staying in the place such a young soul is severely punished. Ghosts gathering in one place, their tells a story about their lives and sufferings that survived during their lives, remind some commentators Mickiewicz's "Dziady". However, I have the impression that every culture has at least one story about being in between, about some desperate clinging to life - whether to revenge or settle unfinished business, or because death can not be reconciled. Besides, this last motive - to agree to death is somehow the key to the novel. Souls staying in the cemetery are deluded by some vision of return or the possibility of influencing reality. They want to see their children, wives, rivals. For various reasons they do not want or can not come to terms with the fact that they have to go further.
It is amazing that in the novel the author managed to show so many characters, so many human fates - each soul has its own story and its own language. We get a social cross-section, people who came to the cemetery at different times. The stories of these souls and spirits are imbued with a sense of unfulfillment, sadness, fear, and grief. They form a narrative about something more than one life, about a whole human existence in which there is usually something missing, in which everything is always too little. But although the book introduces a man in such an amazing atmosphere of true sadness, it is not sad. On the contrary - the author - not only has a sense of humor, but also some faith that this human existence does not necessarily consist of just what is bad. There is faith in this, or even the certainty of the litany of complaints and problems is not everything. At the same time this book has absolutely amazing pieces, where in the stories of next ghosts there is something that you can call - the heart of the eveanything, the feeling that everyone knows, the fear with which you can identify, the sadness that once felt. Is it possible to escape from it? The author, on the one hand, subjects the story rooted in Buddhist spirituality, but on the other - the one we all sense a little, and it does not necessarily have to result from any specific beliefs. A deep humanism emerges from the whole book, which escapes the assignment to one religion or system of beliefs. The fact that it is a book about what happens after death does not make it a less important lesson about life in any way.
Between the voices of the ghosts that we hear throughout the novel, there are quotes from sources describing both the event itself and Lincoln. The juxtaposition is phenomenal - because it shows that sources from the past are almost like ghosts from the novel, telling only their small fragment of reality. At the same time, they so beautifully heal these fragments of illusion that two people see the world in the same way that the same events described by the same witnesses may have something to do with each other, apart from some secondary elements. Voices from sources deny, key, sometimes tell more of their own story than the story of Lincoln and his son. At the same time, again, there are so many feelings in the parts of the past that have been preserved in the descriptions of events, such as insects in amber. Although every quote has a footnote, it would be impossible to distinguish them from the voices of pained souls locked in the cemetery. Besides, the narratives in these two narrations do not run perfectly parallel - where one is going to the end, the other tends in some way to the beginning of the story.
"Lincoln in the Bardo" is an experimental novel. What does it mean? It means that it probably does not resemble most of the novels you've read in your life. This is a story written for dozens of voices - those that speak through existing documents, and those who spend one night in a graveyard. There is no narrator, although everyone can be the narrator in this novel. At first you can feel lost, but on both sides, all strangeness subsides. Personally, this experiment (I do not remember if I read something like that, but I have something in the back of my head, that way this is not a completely foreign form to me) I like a lot and also somehow make reading this story more fascinated. Actually - it has become an integral part of the whole plot. Rejection of everything that is between me and the story of the next characters made it much easier to find yourself in this world. In my opinion, he abolishes the border between the reader and the story.
It is amazing what language the book was written. As I said - Saunders differentiates the language of his various heroes depending on what social class they came from, what experiences they had, but also when they were buried. Some of his characters speak with a very specific manner, some with spelling mistakes. At the same time, it is prose balancing on the verge of poetry, for some it may seem unapproachable, but in fact it concerns issues so common that everyone can find in it. Although at the same time - this is not a novel that is based on a brilliant story, but the brilliance of telling the story. What's wonderful is jumping from realism to a fantastic world, something that really has a bit of romantics but also a refreshing reminder that literature is the only place where you can really find everything. And if you can do everything way not to use it.
I can not tell you what is so phenomenal in this novel. The more I talk about it the more I get the feeling that I miss the point. I comfort myself that when I reading many reviews I had the impression that we are all trying to catch a reviewing scheme and we all escape it - because the book escapes simple categorization. But I know that it is perfect. I know that when I read the last pages, I was simultaneously moved by how the book ends, moved by what the author tells me, and delighted with this awareness that here I read something really perfect, which touches the less frequently used part of the soul where we keep the most important things. I have the impression that words such as "masterpieces" are invented for such books and such experiences. Because this is exactly a novel which you finish to read, put it down on the table, and then for a moment you are neither here nor there, but in your own Bardo, where the fear goes further because who knows what we are still waiting for after such a phenomenal novel.
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