George Saunders
Written: February 14, 2017
Read: March 28, 2021
As I started with this review, I thought that I should transcribe some quotes here, but ultimately I decided each individual quote taken just in a vacuum would just diminish the impact they had within this novel. Lincoln in the Bardo is a surreal experience that plays with language and reality and transcending death. Which made it Jake’s beach read pick for the year.
Firstly, I didn’t like this book nearly as much as the short stories i read of Saunders after i read this (I’m writing this review in November 2021). This book can best be described by me as a meditation. Various characters are tent-poles of the many ways to live and what level of I suppose penance you need to pay to reconcile your past and become something beyond your life. Oh and yes, this story does include President Abraham Lincoln.
Without spoiling much, the book is written so different characters change different prose styles which gives this novel a short story collection within a larger arc structure. Its a novel of death primarily and a story of ghosts( or ghostly people or spirits or something else) grappling with their lives and moving towards some other afterlife. It has a fantasy pastiche mashed into eastern religion. It left me somewhat unsatisfied but entertained and with a few more ideas floating around. I also am a person who has both prayed and meditated and considered the boundary between the two at the personal level over the years, so I may just not be as open to seeing this as fundamentally new. This is in contrast to when I read Siddartha by Herman Hesse a few years back which did give me a new perspective.
Ok I give up, I’ll put this quote here, this is probably better than any more commentary I can give:
“Tying a shoe; tying a knot on a package; a mouth on yours; a hand on yours; the ending of the day; the beginning of the day; the feeling that there will always be a day ahead. Goodbye, I must now say goodbye to all of it.”
This section comes towards the end of the novel and really gets to one of the core issues (or perhaps a core feature) of Lincoln in the Bardo. Ultimately this book should be read aloud, and towards having someone else read it and talk about, even if the impact it had was not new territory for me.
John (Jake) Kolb III 
Nice review! Maybe it’s the style of the book, but your approach here left me wanting to read this one more than the last (I know that’s not your goal). The fantasy novel had lots of exposition and seemed like a lot to jump into–many novels into the series, I would expect this kind of thing. But I particularly like knowing the “Jake-aways” of the novel, as you provide here. I laughed at this sentence: “Lincoln in the Bardo is a surreal experience that plays with language and reality and transcending death. Which made it Jake’s beach read pick for the year.”