'Lincoln In The Bardo' Pictures An American Saint Of Sorrow

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By NPR STAFF • 9 HOURS AGO

George Saunders is acclaimed as a genius of the short story — and now he's written his first novel. It reads as part Our Town, part ghost story, and even part Ken Burns. It's a story that gives voice to a child who has died, and resonance to the silence of his father, who is enveloped by — and the instrument of — much grief.

Lincoln in the Bardo is a novel that grows from the seed of the real-life death in 1862 of Willie Lincoln, the 11-year-old son of Abe and Mary Lincoln. Saunders tells NPR's Scott Simon that the bardo is a Tibetan concept, a kind of transitional zone. "For example, we're in the bardo right now that goes from birth to death," he says. "And the book takes place just after that, in the bardo that goes from death to whatever's next. In the Buddhist world it would be reincarnation."

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On whether there are religious themes in the book

Oh yeah, I think so. If you dwell on that conundrum that we talked about earlier, that's almost by definition a spiritual question — we're here, it seems pretty wonderful, it's gonna end, how should we behave. In the Buddhist tradition, one of the ideas is that your mind and body in this realm kind of work together to dampen the mind's wild qualities. And then when you die, that tether gets cut, and your mind is sort of supersized. So whatever habits or neuroses, or pleasures, or mythologies that you indulge in here will be sort of exaggeratedly large. So that seems like kind of an admonition that we should watch what our minds do.

And then also one of the intriguing ideas is that whatever your symbolic system is here, that's what you'll think when you go beyond. So if you're a strong Christian, you'll see saints, and you'll see Jesus and so on. Strong Tibetan Buddhists tend to see Tibetan deities. So again that's kind of wonderful but also a little cautionary — because if you're only watching pro wrestling, it might be a surprise when you get there.

http://wmot.org/post/lincoln-bardo-pictures-american-saint-sorrow#stream/0

Audio at link.