Campbell Andrews’s Reviews > Lincoln in the Bardo > Status Update

This is almost one of the all-time greats, but (ironically) it bears too much the mark of our age.

Still: "Someone's kind wishes for you; someone remembering to write; someone noticing that you are not at all at ease."

The second half of this book does not, I fear, work as well as the first.

I am not sure the central conceit can support so much weight.

the sheer amount of scholarship & verbiage produced about current events, since the rise of mass media, has already changed fiction- Saunders' novel is perhaps the first to realize this reality.

stunning: "four parallel blind-cast linear shadows creep across a sleeping tabby's midday flank"

Saunders is on such another level that it's a marvel I should feel the slightest encouragement to produce any fiction myself

not only does he incorporate other works in a surprising and audacious way, but I'm catching allusions- conceptually and thematically to C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, for one

I am already certain that this novel has set a new standard for historical fiction

so... whole chapters are excerpts from histories of the period? I am not even sure this is a novel at all.

I do not know how to read this book.

This is simultaneously thrilling and frustrating.