My Thoughts on Lincoln in the Bardo Audiobook

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The long-awaited first novel from the author of Tenth of December: a moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president says at the time. "God has called him home." Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy's body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state--called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo--a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul. Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction's ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?

Praise for Lincoln in the Bardo

"A luminous feat of generosity and humanism."--Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review

"A masterpiece."--Zadie Smith

"Ingenious . . . Saunders--well on his way toward becoming a twenty-first-century Twain--crafts an American patchwork of love and loss, giving shape to our foundational sorrows."--Vogue

"Saunders is the most humane American writer working today."--Harper's Magazine

"The novel beats with a present-day urgency--a nation at war with itself, the unbearable grief of a father who has lost a child, and a howling congregation of ghosts, as divided in death as in life, unwilling to move on."--Vanity Fair

"A brilliant, Buddhist reimagining of an American story of great loss and great love."--Elle

"Wildly imaginative"--Marie Claire

"Mesmerizing . . . Dantesque . . . A haunting American ballad."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Exhilarating . . . Ruthless and relentless in its evocation not only of Lincoln and his quandary, but also of the tenuous existential state shared by all of us." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"It's unlike anything you've ever read, except that the grotesque humor, pathos, and, ultimately, human kindness at its core mark it as a work that could come only from Saunders."--The National

If you are thinking wait….didnt you already review this audiobook and DNF cause you could not understand it? You would be right I did review it at the start of 2018 and gave it an hour before realizing that I could understand it for crap.

However, my audiologist told me that as you become more used to hearing, then you can listen to more advanced stuff, such as an audiobook with a bunch of dead people in a type of waypoint between life and death. So when I saw it on Scribd, I decided to give it a try and GUESS WHAT?1 I could understand it. And I finally realized why people were so in love with the audio version.  IT IS AMAZING  Seriously I could not stop listening for the whole 7 hours.

There is a whole cast for this audio production. In my previous review, I explained that the cast was hard to understand as it was like being in a crowd and not knowing who was going to speak next and at that point in time I lacked the ability to understand more than one person at a time.

I kept up with practicing mt hearing and wearing my implants. As I was born profoundly Deaf this was all new territory for me, and at times my confidence with hearing waned, and I would become frustrated and wondered why the hell I decided to get the implants in the first place. I kept on, and I felt I might have been getting better but was not sure.

I was browsing Scribd and saw the audiobook of Lincoln in the Bardo and decided to see if it made more sense now than it did in January.

And it did!!

I was floored, and I could also appreciate the brilliance of this audiobook this time around. This has got to be one of the best audiobooks of this year. And let’s face it I have read a LOT of audiobooks in 2018 according to my tracker I am up t 65 audiobooks! And Lincoln in the Bardo blew me away.

When I first head the word Bardo I had no idea what it meant so I went to look it up. It turns out that Bardo is a kind of limbo in the Tibetan lore. This is also where the major events take place as the characters attempt to get Willie out of the “in-between” and in to “the good place.” Lincoln in the Bardo touch on themes of grief,  loss, and sorrow. When I Saat it touches on them I mean the book goes deep so if you havr had a loss recently you may want to steer away from this book.
I myself had not thought about a lot of stuff mentioned in Lincoln in the Bardo. Take the whole scene in the afterlife and the sort of purgatory the characters find themselves in we can begin to see how here among the living many of us are living a slow death in purgatory here on earth. We need to wake up to whatever this life has to give you.

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