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Rezension zu
Lincoln im Bardo

Well-deserved winner of the Man Booker Prize 2017

Von: MeikeReads
07.01.2019

In a way, this is a book about freedom - freedom in life and in death. While the Civil War is raging, Lincoln loses his beloved eleven-year-old son Willie to typhoid fever. Grief-stricken, he doubts himself as a parent and as a President: "He is just one. And the weight of it about to kill me. Have exported this grief. Some three thousand times. So far. To date. A mountain. Of boys. Someone's boys. Must keep on with it. May not have the heart for it." But Willie has not yet reached the realm of the dead, he is stuck in the Bardo, meaning the space between the time one dies and what comes next. By introducing many other ghosts who occupy the graveyard with Willie, Saunders paints a panorama of the American people at the time of the Civil War, and meditates about the human condition as such: Some ghosts are held back because they do not want to leave their beloved relatives, some are unable to face the truth about themselves, others feel like they have tasks to finish, matters to settle. We meet slaves, slavemasters, dedicated mothers, loving husbands, drunkards, criminals, a reverend, a gay man, and many others, including, of course, Willie Lincoln, desperate but unable to communicate with his father who comes to visit his corpse in the burial crypt at night. In his despair, the President is just one more powerless mourner tormented by his grief. Lincoln is caught up in his sadness, just as the ghosts are caught up in the Bardo. How can the President find the perseverance to continue his fight to abolish slavery, and how can the ghosts find the courage to leave the Bardo? The way Saunders answers these questions is beautiful, poetic, and very moving. As we follow the story, many of the ghosts are able to break free from the Bardo, since they are learning to make peace with their own stories, the lives they lived and the future they did not live to see. Instead of being tormented, they are set free and can move on to whatever lies beyond. We all know what Lincoln proceeded to do, and Saunders depicts his inner struggle beautifully (and even lets those who will not profit from his policies anymore help him to regain courage: "We are ready, sir; are angry, are capable; our hopes are coiled up so tight as to be deadly, to be holy; turn us loose, sir, let us at it, let us show what we can do."). It has often been remarked that the text resembles a play, as it is wholly compiled of quotations by the ghosts and from (partly invented) historical sources about Lincoln and the Civil War. Although the audiobook version works really well and is very impressive, I do not think that a stage or film version of "Lincoln in the Bardo" could easily be produced, or at least I believe that the overall effect would be quite different from the book (which of course is not necessarily a bad thing). But this text does things that only literature can attain, and it's those things that make us read fiction in the first place. The last chapter is a prime example of this - it is magical.

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