CORAL GABLES, FL – FEBRUARY 19: Author George Saunders poses for portrait after discussing and signing copies of his new book “Lincoln in the Bardo” at Books and Books on February 19, 2017 in Coral Gables, Florida. (Photo by Johnny Louis/FilmMagic)

BooksMarch 30, 2017

Book of the Week: the best novel of 2017, Lincoln in the Bardo

Wyoming Paul

Contributing writer

George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo is the year’s most talked-about novel, and there’s much excitement that the author will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival in May. Wyoming Paul reviews what may be a masterpiece.

A year into the Civil War, a tormented President Lincoln visits his 11-year-old son’s crypt in the cemetery. He holds his boy’s body one final time. His son Willie’s spirit is also present, tethered to the world of the living, out of longing to see his father again. The cemetery is populated by hundreds of other spirits, colourful and strange characters, who have refused to move on.

At its simplest level, Lincoln in the Bardo is a compassionate depiction of Lincoln at the most difficult time of his life – mourning his young son, while conducting a bloody civil war. But it’s also a meditation – a dark, comical, deeply empathetic meditation – on the universality of suffering, and the acceptance of dying with regrets and unfulfilled hopes.

Saunders mixes these daunting subjects with humour and a wonderful quirkiness. The introduction of Willie Lincoln, for example, occurs when one of the spirits, Vollman, is talking about the involuntary poop he did in his funeral clothes: “I hope you do not find this rude, young sir, or off-putting, I hope it does not impair our nascent friendship – that poop is still down there, at this moment, in my sick-box, albeit much drier!”

Combining that, flawlessly, with President Lincoln’s profound sorrow and a poignant understanding of the human condition…well, it’s quite something.

George Saunders poses for portrait after discussing and signing copies of “Lincoln in the Bardo” on February 19, 2017 in Coral Gables, Florida.

Willie Lincoln and the many spirits who remain in the cemetery are existing in a purgatory, or “bardo”, meaning the state between life and death. They are both unwilling to leave the world – and unwilling to accept that they have died at all. Almost all go to extreme lengths to believe that they might one day recover from whatever illness they have, referring to their coffins as “sick-boxes” and their corpses as “sick-forms”.

The spirits manifest with awful and often ridiculous deformities, each a symbol of their greatest connection to the living. Vollman, who died on the day that he would have consummated his marriage, presents with a limb-sized erection; a former hunter sits with the huge pile of animals he’s killed, holding each one in turn for hours or months until they come back to life; a woman who was a slave has feet and hands worn down to bloody stumps.

Saunders’s narrative is experimental and brave, written from the constantly changing perspectives of the spirits in the cemetery, all who are weird and fascinating, and difficult not to adore. We hear a cacophony of stories, all wanting to be told – of black slaves, soldiers, young women, a reverend, mothers, murderers, a rape victim – and can’t help but love (almost) all.

Other sections are composed entirely of beautifully arranged snippets from primary and secondary sources, describing aspects of Lincoln’s life – the ugliness or handsomeness of his face, whether or not the moon shone on the night of the Lincolns’ party while Willie lay burning with typhoid fever upstairs. Throughout, the novel moves easily between Saunders’s bizarre dark humour and the deep suffering of the characters, both those who existed and those who are fictional.

While those who died as adults can endure in this in-between world, Willie and other children cannot. Much of the progress which happens throughout the novel revolves around the spirits attempting to help Willie move on – while Lincoln is also attempting to reconcile his son’s death with the war he has declared, where thousands of other sons are being killed.

With Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders has achieved nothing less than expanded the form of the novel. He’s knitted together history and fiction, and combined profound insights on human suffering with bawdy, rude, and comical narration. He’s created an American Civil War novel which is actually fun. Perhaps it could have done with a stronger female voice. But, my god – this is a rare achievement, a work of art.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Bloomsbury, $33) is available at Unity Books.

Keep going!

Katherine Mansfield

BooksMarch 28, 2017

Let us now contemplate what to do with Katherine Mansfield’s bones: a proposal by Vincent O’Sullivan

Vincent O'Sullivan

Guest writer

Katherine Mansfield

We asked the distinguished Katherine Mansfield scholar Vincent O’Sullivan to comment on the recent attempt by Wellington’s mayor to repatriate the bones of Katherine Mansfield.

I once heard of an artist whose partner believed her legal status, even in life, meant “owner under all circumstances.” As a widow, there was even more to own. Not the Angel of Grief, so much as the Seraphim of Total Possession, mourned at the graveside. In an ideal world, she would have allowed only those with direct permission to look at his work. As nothing is ideal, she settled for attempting to prevent all mention of him except on her own terms. Her role in life: Custodian of the Bones.

I began to write a story that was not in the least based on life, in which a woman whose husband was a very famous sportsman, perhaps even one who had been called to the Black, read of how diamonds are compressed from other elements, and so with the benefits of science, had reduced him to what you might call his ultimate value, every component of the man to the size of an ear-stud, a matching pendant, a filling in her front tooth. As the widow knew, even to smile at the postie, to thank the staff at Kentucky Fried, was to say without saying a word, “Who owns him now?”

But the literary world being so rightly alert to lapses in taste, I put the story aside. How it sprang to mind this week, though, as I read of Wellington’s mayor Justin Lester who dreams the headline, “Katie Coming Home!”

It has always struck me as a curious thing, how readers at times so hanker to own an author, beyond carrying her books in a shoulder bag, or reading her in a library. That urge to get closer, to know what life was like when she wasn’t writing, to pick up scraps she didn’t know she had let drop. It is an understandable, even a touching, trait. Mansfield readers often seem more than usually prone to the condition. I have heard of “Kezia Parties” on October 14 where even men are permitted to wear pinnies. Or an event on May 3, when guests are invited to throw paint balls at another guest whose name is drawn at random to dress up as Middleton Murry.

In our capital city one is able at times to see a lock of hair; the shawl that covered a coffin; the typewriter; the manuscripts with their lines of text like distant tangled wire. (An image I draw from her childhood in Karori.) So what a deft mayoral instinct this seems to be – we must own the bones. Are our corporeal remains no more than our pure water, to be given free to foreigners? Yet the recumbent, a niggler says, didn’t she choose France as where she preferred to live? Ah yes, the mayor says, to live! He has us there! But who would prefer to lie, forever, near rackety Versailles, when Wellington is still on offer?

And so what, if motorways may have dug up Mother and Father, and much of the cast of the stories, and heaped them in where you couldn’t sort a Lottie from a Laura? A trivial objection. As if at such expense, we’d not find room – Makara, Newtown Park, somewhere – for Her! Our Her! Where no roads are planned.

I applaud the Mayor for having thought it through. And if I may return to my own discarded story. Need it be fantasy after all? The Literary Jewel of the Pacific. See what I have in mind? Katherine shaped by us, as we have been shaped by her. We are not without gifted craftsfolk. Think: the potential of the bones. A nose flute for our orchestra. A paperweight gifted to a Royal Visitor. The mayor of the time, saying with pride to her/his partner, as they leave home for a civic function, “Darling! You’re wearing our Katherine!”

Is it hoping too much, that we might process this further?