Lincoln in the Bardo

A Mixed Bag

I found the audiobook to be frustrating, to say the least. I love Saunders' work and know that the printed version of this novel is likely much better than this audiobook version indicates. As is, there are some good narrators (Nick Offerman), some decent ones (David Sedaris), and some utterly terrible ones, who feel like they are reading their lines with a gun to their heads. I think the stilted language of the 1860s was too much an impediment to some of these voices. Another problem is that the actors were not recording a shared experience - in other words, they were not together at the time and were not able to fully feed off each other's lines and work as a true ensemble. Few actors enjoy working under those conditions. The story rambles and ambles about, speakers are interrupted, and there is no cohesive emotional center sustained throughout. I felt at times that I was in the audience of a bad high school play. That said, there are some beautiful moments and funny moments, too. Too bad they're buried amidst the mess.

127 of 136 people found this review helpful

George Saunders answer to Dante's Inferno

I've not listened to many books but it's hard to imagine one that could be more entertaining than Lincoln. The actors speaking for the characters make the story seem more like a play. A truly wonderful play.
The images that are conjured up by George Saunders are so vivid ,heartbreaking , and comical at the same time. This book found me when I was beginning my journey of grief over the sudden loss of my 35 year old disabled daughter. The scene in the beginning where the spirit of Willy is standing with his father with his arm around his him comforting him gave me comfort and made me feel that my daughter was sitting close to me with her arm around me.
It also gave me a glimmer of hope that if President Lincoln could endure this terrible loss and go on eventually with his life maybe so could I. It's been 6 months now and I've listened to the book gradually during these months and just finished it tonight. This book has been one of the most important pieces of my healing. My deepest thanks to George Saunders for this precious gift.
Betty Reardon Vance

126 of 136 people found this review helpful

Difficult

There are just too many characters voiced by too many people and burdened by too many footnotes to follow. I found my attention wandering.

49 of 53 people found this review helpful

Creative

I enjoyed the creativity of this book. I did not enjoy the constant interruptions citing references.

17 of 18 people found this review helpful

Disappointment!

I wanted so much more from this book than I received. If I had known what “Bardo” meant prior to picking this up at Audible, I may have enjoyed the listen better. On many reviews of the book on-line, people state that it is not for all tastes. I can agree that it was not for me.

Centered around a cemetery, spirits, and Lincoln mourning the loss of his young son, the story is filled with what was and what could be. In between the spaces, multitude of period quotes are intertwined with the story to interject relevance, experience and fact. Characters, and there are many of them, narrate their own lives and how and why they seem to be trapped in this limbo state. Many fear the next state – moving on. All this can get quite confusing.

The production of this book is awful. There are long gaps of silence between some of the chapters that makes you think the audio has stopped working. It is almost impossible to know when a quote is delivered versus the actual narrative of a character. And there are so many readers. Its absurdly confusing.

How this won the Booker is a mystery to me.

32 of 35 people found this review helpful

"Where might God stand?"

I'll preface my review with some information that might be helpful to those struggling with the presentation of this little novel: Much has, and will be written about the style Saunders has chosen for this magnificent and ground breaking novel. In 1959, ( Mr. Sanders was 1 yr. old) neuroscientist/psychologist Bela Julesz had the idea that depth perception happened in the brain, and not in the eye itself and decided to test people’s ability to see in 3D. Thus was born the bane of the ocularly-challenged, the autostereogram: "a single-image stereogram, designed to create the visual illusion of a three-dimensional (3D) scene from a two-dimensional image"...consequently released to the public in the '90's as Magic Eye Pictures. You remember...you stared, crossed your eyes, fretted -- and then POP! The mysterious picture revealed itself hovering above a flat kaleidoscope of colors.
And so;
Earbuds secured, listening to the multi-cast presentation of this book, I thought of those pictures; waiting for the image to pop, ready to throw in the towel at the babble of voices and interjected references that flooded into my head. My mind felt 2 steps behind my ears...and then abruptly, the glorious pop and flow of clarity. Another dimension whirled around me and swept me into a story with dimensions I've never known before. Yes, it is a little reminiscent of the Greek chorus; a bit similar in effect to Scrooge standing with a spirit from another time, immersed in the gossamer voices and images while his head was still in the present. Point is...this series of incorporeal monologues works, be patient (no crossing your eyes needed). Even current-day biographer Doris Kearns Goodwins is represented, her book quoted by a graveyard spirit.

Where is The Bardo? You might ask. The bardo is a Tibetan term that refers to an in between state, a transitional state, and in the case of Lincoln at the Bardo, the state between life and death for Willie, the state of decision for a president to press on with a horrible civil war or choose to end that war whose body count in the first year was already into the thousands. Saunders, one of America's most acclaimed and intelligent writers, and a student of Buddhist philosophy, ponders: "What state of mind would a man be in at 12:45 a.m., on a cold February night, five minutes after he's seen and held his dead son's body?" [G. Saunders for TIME,Feb 16, 2017]

Willie, 11 yrs. old, has died of Typhoid fever. Lincoln's second child to pass away. At the foot of the "huge carved rosewood bed," [the *Lincoln Bed"] Elizabeth Keckly, a former slave who washed and dressed the little body, observed the gray-face President, "his tall frame convulsed with emotion. I shall never forget those solemn moments -- genius and greatness weeping over love's idol lost." The body was moved to the family vault of the clerk of the Supreme Court, William and wife Sallie Carroll. Alone, late at night after the funeral, the father lifts the coffin lid and puts his arms around the body of his dead son. Around him the Voices in utter surprise at this contact begin calling out to each other their monologues. The reader observes the scene, the voices coming in as if from a gauzy curtain in front of the tomb. Saunders' chorus of ghostly voices begin their requiem for Willie, and for Lincoln. *This is where the confusion, or frustration for some listeners, becomes a manner of sticking with it until the Magic Eyes picture appears and the voices flow in a smooth synchronicity with the story.

A word about the Voices. Saunders explained the process of producing the effect of the chorus in an interview with TIME. He and the Penguin Random House team auditioned and cast 166 actors for the parts needed to voice Lincoln at the Bardo for the audio version. BRAVO! to each and every one of them for their performance and unison of spirit. Each voice in this chorus is rich in character, the words chosen, the voice inflections, the way they embellish, their distractions and emotions all sketching in their character when they were alive. It's wonderful fun; it's heartbreaking. There's the lechers, the snobs, the criminals, the homosexual, and references to those who still cannot speak of the horrors that drove them to death, all caught in their own dialogues that keep them from passing into an afterlife. They recant the actual daily headlines and hearsay. Though sourced, the facts often contradict each other..."it was a clear sunny day"..."there was a violent storm"...""the president shook with agony..."was profoundly moved by his death, though he gave no outward sign of his trouble". In one passage that struck me, the spirits move through the body of Lincoln to pull him back to the Georgetown cemetery. An African American specter says that he [Lincoln] passed through her and she "was glad, his burden to hard to share" if she lingered there. The audio version is a rare gift to readers, a fuller experience than only reading the text. Even though, I immediately purchased the text. This story is at the same time agonizing, humorous, and beautifully wise.

Saunders is a joy to read; a writer's writer that can call out the harshest conflict with such compassion that he seems to be testifying this love for all of humanity like a loving and wise teacher. He fits into my consciousness like a crystalline tool, harmonizing my thoughts and my feelings with his perfect words. I must be a sight to see when I'm listening...my head shakes and nods, I smile, I wince, and sometimes I feel a tear, cold from it's travel down my cheek, drip onto my shoulder. His sophisticated prose unflinchingly captures the voice of our culture often soaring close to poetry. Lincoln at the Bardo has become my favorite book, right now at least, for the breadth of feelings it invoked in me. It is immersive and thoughtful..."pushing our aversions into the light" with grace and compassion for our human frailties. There are some that this won't appeal to, but for those that are considering this one...don't waste another second. This is epic.

These words and their message feel like they came from the heart of the man that wrote "Four score and seven years ago...." This kind of writing is why I read.

"His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact…We must try to see one another in this way…As suffering, limited beings…Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces…And yet…Our grief must be defeated; it must not become our master, and make us ineffective…We must, to do the maximum good, bring the thing to its swiftest halt and…Kill more efficiently…Must end suffering by causing more suffering…His heart dropped at the thought of the killing…"

281 of 325 people found this review helpful

A first-rate radio drama, not a mere audiobook

Would you consider the audio edition of Lincoln in the Bardo to be better than the print version?

Yes! Not that I've seen the print version, but the different voices for each character are a huge enhancement to a book with so many characters. Some chapters are composed of excerpts from historical sources, often from firsthand accounts, and these were also enhanced by being read in different voices.

What did you like best about this story?

The connection between Lincoln's personal grief and his empathy for the grief being faced by the nation, culminating in the epiphany that despite seeing this grief it was his duty to continue on with whatever brutality was required to win the war. His struggle, in turn, connects with that of the other characters, who are ghosts living in a form of purgatory, unable to move past life's disappointments into the "next place"; they are all helped along both by the president and his son.

What about the narrators’s performance did you like?

Really, this is more a first-rate radio drama than an audiobook. The actors make each character unique and relatable.

Who was the most memorable character of Lincoln in the Bardo and why?

I wouldn't want to pick one. The lead "ghosts" portrayed by Nick Offerman and David Sedaris were excellent. Probably the central portrait was of Lincoln himself, which we saw from many different perspectives including his own, his son's, and the ghosts (most of whom don't know at first that he is president.)

5 of 5 people found this review helpful

Could not listen to it

Would you try another book from George Saunders and/or the narrators?

Probably not.

Has Lincoln in the Bardo turned you off from other books in this genre?

I don't think this book even belongs to a genre. Too avant garde.

What aspect of the narrators’s performance would you have changed?

The narration of multiple voices was the least of the problems.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Confusion.

Any additional comments?

This book was too bizarre and hard to follow. I gave it two hours and deleted it.

30 of 35 people found this review helpful

Ibits and Op Cits do not a story make.

Feels as though more than half of the story is made of quotes followed by endless citations. Many of these quotes are a sentence long, the citation longer than the quote. The cumulative effect is deadening, pun intended. What is the intent of this repetitious soporific except a plea to admire the author's research?
Even a lugubrious tale needs an interjection of humor; the contrast heightens the dolor. (Cf., Dante) None is to be found here unless your comic sense delights in woeful descriptions of flatulence and giant penises. Mine doesn't.
Slogging through this story suggests a better title: Readers in the Bardo.

86 of 102 people found this review helpful

Odd, beautiful, and deeply humane

Where does Lincoln in the Bardo rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

One of the best I've heard. Story and performance are both superb.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Lincoln in the Bardo?

Each of the characters is so utterly distinct and consistent. I particularly loved Mr. Bevins' excursuses on the beauty of the quotidian world.

Which scene was your favorite?

Perhaps the airing of the grievances towards the end - each person's particular pain was so precisely described.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

More than I can count.

Any additional comments?

This book definitely won't be for everyone, and it takes a bit of patience to get oriented to the style and the story, but the writing is alternately perfectly vulgar and achingly poetic, the story moves effortlessly between glory and hilarity and grief, and Saunders seems to love each of his characters - and humanity - with the same kind of anguished adoration that motivated much of Vonnegut's work.

4 of 4 people found this review helpful