Ann Feild

The dreamlike flow of Lincoln in the Bardo made the reading of it a little like taking some mildly hallucinogenic substance. The characters, spirits suspended in the Bardo between “that” [this] world and their ultimate fate, spar with one another restlessly. A grieving and guilt-ridden Abraham Lincoln cannot bear to see his dear little son Willie, dead from typhoid fever, put away in the “sick box,” as the ghosts term coffins and sepulchers. He visits the cemetery alone, twice after his son’s interment in a temporary mausoleum, to commune with him, even going so far as to remove the lid of his coffin and holding the dead boy in his gangly arms. The boy’s spirit looks on and even enters his father’s body — He is not the only spirit to do so in the book. The community of souls in the Oak Hill Cemetery — and some from “outside the fence” — agitate to be freed from this waiting room between Earthly life and the next phase — of what? Damnation? Reincarnation? I must admit to being quite ignorant and confused about the Tibetan Bardo concept and so may well have misunderstood some of what Saunders is referring to with the characters’ musings and anxieties. The interplay of the frustrated few main spirits and the larger population resembled a stage script without stage directions; the dialogue is fabulously inventive, by turns poignant, tragic, eerie, bawdy, and mordantly funny. Certain phrases repeat throughout the book — for instance, the “familiar, yet always bone-chilling, firesound associated with the matterlightblooming phenomenon” (signaling a soul’s release to the the next phase). Excerpts from actual news stories, letters, and Lincoln biographies interweave with the spirits’ “lines,” lending authenticity to the historical context, that of the Civil War. I loved this unusually structured book and think it warrants a second read. After I brush up on the Bardo, i.e.