Two novels, two distinctly different writers, and two very
different subjects, yet both get to the most profound human truths and both
tell fantastically imaginative tales. Good bookends for philosophical readers
and book groups who enjoy a challenge.
If you haven’t read this multiple award winning novel, read THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
by Colson Whitehead. You’ve all heard of it I’m sure, compliments of Oprah, and stellar reviews, and you likely know that
Whitehead transforms the allegorical railroad into a real railway line that
transports slaves to freedom. Each stop along the way presents new challenges
and sub-cultures and the ever-present question of who can you trust? A
remarkable leap the reader accepts because Whitehead makes it work.
I went back to his first novel, THE INTUITIONIST, equally inventive, about elevator repair mechanics who intuit
danger, and like the latest, is built around a black female protagonist facing both discrimination and distrust.
Cora faces the horrors of enslavement
from childhood to jaded adult. Once she decides to seek freedom, and is caught
up in a killing in the process, she is pursued throughout the book by a most
evil slave-hunter, determined to maintain his reputation and bring Cora and
friends back to face punishment. The narrative tension is intense from start to
finish as we take this heroine’s journey with her, with increasingly greater
terrors and uncertainty at every turn. A page-turner and another brilliant,
disturbing evocation of America’s history of racism. The novel will dovetail
nicely with George Saunders, because the time period is roughly the same, and both
underscore historical turmoil, although the two novels could not be more
different in style.
George Saunders has proven again and again to be a creative
and masterful short story writer. With his first novel, LINCOLN AT THE BARDO,
he proves himself to be a master of the long form as well. Meet
President Lincoln, mourning the death of his young son, Willie, who himself is
in a transitional state, encountering eclectic ephemeral lives moving through
the spiritual transition known in Buddhism as the Bardo. These spirits serve in
effect as a chorus, reflecting past, present and future, as they come and go.
Some are hilarious, others macabre, some beyond understanding.
The Tibetans
suggest several Bardos, physical or meditative. Lincoln himself goes
through a series of transitions in life and presidency, mirroring the movement
of his son and fellow spirits. They all reflect the devastation of a civil war
that weighs heavily on this president. I warn you, do not read this novel when
tired, as the myriad of voices will be impossible to follow, and I also promise
that if you hang in through the early series of reflections that don’t seem to
make sense, suddenly they will, and the novel takes off.
Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times called Bardo a “weird folk
art diorama of a cemetery come to life.” I think of it as a cross between the
Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and Thoreau. This novel will win, and deserve,
many awards, and while it takes time and concentration to wade through, can be compared to reading Dostoyevsky or studying a painting by Picasso: perspectives vary, they
contradict and enhance, and force the reader into existential questioning that is
the essence of the philosophical. Truly, nothing like this has been written before
or is likely to be written again.
Both in hardcover or e-reader, and the Saunders audio edition features many actors, worth a listen.
