Within this transitional statecalled, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardoa monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul. Together, their dialog often tells a single story. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. These sections of the book read much like a play - where one “ghost” says one thing (immediately followed by the identification of who is speaking) and then a second adds detail or opinion and so on. The bardo - a Buddhist term referring to the transitional space between death and rebirth - is populated by many deceased people from different time periods, all having conversations, arguing, and exchanging anecdotes about their lives. And, for me, the beautifully written passages featuring these two characters were my favorites–Willie trying to understand the very adult concept that he has lost his life and our former President weighed down by incomprehensible grief in the middle of a national crisis.īut as the title implies, most of the “action” takes place in the bardo, with MANY other characters. Willie’s temporary afterlife in Oak Hill has become the subject of George Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House), now being published after a half-dozen books of. LINCOLN IN THE BARDO takes place in 1862, the middle of the American Civil War, around the death of 11-year-old William “Willie” Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln’s son.
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