Renowned short story author George Saunders has released his first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo.” The book explores Lincoln's grief after losing his son Willie and the difficulty and pain that can occur while transitioning through the dividing markers of our life. Saunders joined Boston Public Radio Friday to discuss the acclaimed novel. What follows are excerpts from that conversation.
The meaning behind the bardo.
“The bardo is a Tibetan word that means transitional state and usually it’s used to talk about that state that exists between the incident of your death and whatever happens next, let's say reincarnation. It is that realm that we don’t really know about, but might be important.”
What fascinated him about the story of Lincoln at Oak Hill Cemetery.
“In 1862 Lincoln’s beloved son passed away and there were reports in the newspaper that Lincoln had been so grief-stricken that he actually went into the crypt on several occasions, and somehow interacted with the body. I heard this way back when our kids were little during the Clinton administration. I thought first of all, how does a president leave the White House alone, and second of all, the terrible pain of that. I put that in the bag of stuff I would like to write about someday. I put it aside for 20 years and it kept bugging me and in 2012 I gave it a try.”
Why he put off writing the book for 20 years.
“My work is mostly sci-fi, dystopian, funny — there is just a little squeamishness that I had found a comfort zone in which I was having some success. I thought that this was going to require more straight writing that I felt I could do. In other words, I didn’t think I could find a prose style that would come alive in this story.”
On the unique prose style of the book.
“Part of the fun for me is that if you are going to write about the afterlife it would be pretty weird if the afterlife turns out to be exactly what we think, 'Hi, Saint Peter.' … I thought part of the fun would be to make an afterlife that was a little freaky. That wasn’t what you expected. Also, that the reading experience itself would be a bit destabilizing. By a lot of trial and error, I came up with this way where there are something like 250 monologues in the book by 166 different speakers, but the attributions are given at the end. So I think often, people are telling me they're reading and they don’t quite know who is speaking and the first 15 pages are a bit of a challenge. They knock you off your feet and hopefully that pays off in the end.”
Distinguishing historical fact from historical fiction.
“We have to be really strong in the distinction, because in a work of art you pay your money, you walk into the thing labeled novel, and you were playing a game together that involves lots of gamesmanship and fun. The whole point of that is to spit out some beautiful, transcendent moment for you, the reader. It is kind of like when you are telling your kids a ghost story and you say, 'and it happened in this very room.' They know that it didn’t, but the idea that it did makes the story better. When you are on the podium at the White House, and you say A and you know B is true, that is a totally different thing.”
The impact of losing his son and why Lincoln is such a beloved figure.
"The effect on him, we don’t really know, but what I came to think was, okay you’ve got this terrifying loss, what does it do? It tenderizes you somewhat. Then you take that new tender self and suddenly there you are in 1862, you know what does that do. Historically, Lincoln, we love him because his empathy pod expanded as things got tougher. He came to love more people. He came to love these Americans who were being enslaved. He came to love even the soldiers of the south.”
