Lincoln in the Bardo

When George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo was published in 2017 I skimmed through or glanced at a few very favourable reviews for it but was not tempted at that time to obtain a copy. I’m not sure it even registered with me when the novel won that year’s Man Booker Prize. Some years later, a friend enthused in a letter about Saunders' short story collection Tenth of December. While I didn’t act on that recommendation either, it did come back to mind when, late last year, I pulled a second-hand copy of Lincoln in the Bardo from a shelf at Broadleaf Books. As I was paying for it, the shop’s co-proprietor warmly praised the book, having lately read it himself with his book club. Even then, I didn’t read it right away.

The book, from the 7th printing of the UK hardback edition, was still somewhere in the middle of my ‘to be read’ pile at the time when I would have perused the listicle in which “The New York Times named it the 18th-best book of the 21st century”, which, again, failed to induce me to open it. Then, last month, while reading Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and feeling not quite in the right mood for its leisurely pace, I wandered over to the to pile in which Lincoln in the Bardo had been languishing and picked it up. On the back of its jacket were snippets from reviews I’d skimmed though or glanced at. Printed on the front so as to resemble a sticker (that I kept wanting to peel off), was mention of its Man Booker Prize win.

I finished it the day before yesterday. My estimation isn’t so very far from that of The New York Times: it’s somewhere up there among the most inventive, interesting and affecting novels I’ve read in recent decades. Unlike them, it wouldn’t occur to me to try to give it a numerical ranking. I thought it a story with many virtues and few flaws. It did strike me as a little baggy in places, and could perhaps have been edited down and tightened up just a smidgeon. I don’t think any summarisation of mine could do the book justice. I’d just suggest that if you happen to see a copy on a shelf somewhere (and you’ve not already read it), then pick it up, have a look, and see what you think.