And he was assassinated as the war drew to a close, ensuring his legacy could not be tarnished by any future descent from the height of his powers. His speeches are among the greatest ever made by a politician. He thought like a legal scholar but projected the empathy of a statesman. He led the north to victory in the Civil War, and abolished slavery by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. He became president at what remains the most fraught moment in American history. Abraham Lincoln was an autodidact who rose to fame from an inauspicious backwoods upbringing. Yet despite what should have been ideal preparation, I was unprepared for what I found there.Īs any student of American history knows, the ostensible subject of Lincoln in the Bardo is the most revered of all US presidents. I had read all of Saunders’s short fiction collections, as well as a great many interviews and essays, before opening his first novel. George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, which last night won the 2017 Booker Prize, is that rare kind of book. Knowing this, you might expect that fresh, experimental novels would constantly be arriving on my desk, that I would be inundated with literary innovation.īut it is in fact rare to come across a book that does something genuinely new and startling with the form of the novel, a form with a long and distinguished history. I am someone who reads, teaches, and writes about contemporary American fiction for a living.
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