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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. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy's body. 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.… (more)
I was immediately seduced by this book. Willie Lincoln, 11 years old, son of President Abraham Lincoln is gripped by typhoid at a time when in the wider America, Civil War is raging. Willie dies, and enters a supernatural domain peopled by a motley collection unable to accept that their lives, and their chances to influence the lives of others, are over. Here is a band of souls given over to meddling and getting involved in events they cannot change. This supernatural world, filled with as varied a collection of souls as Washington itself is the seat of squabbles, sympathy and sniping. Everyone though feels sympathy for Willie, and for his grief-stricken father. The book is realised in a collection of sentences, half-sentences, occasional longer soliloquies from the deceased residents of this nether world. Quotations and exposition from contemporary historic documents pepper the narrative. It's hard to articulate how this book works, or why it does. But it gripped me. I found it an unforgettable and tantalisingly different book, and one which deserves to be read again. I don't often read books twice. ( )
A strange story strangely told. The flipping back and forth between narrators was a bit jarring at first, but I did become used to it. I sense this is the type of book one either loves or hates, not much in between. While I found it fascinating i am not sure I would recommend it to anyone i know as reading material. ( )
On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.
Quotations
I will never forget those solemn moments—genius and greatness weeping over the love's lost idol.
Having never loved or been loved in that previous place, they were frozen here in a youthful state of perpetual emotional vacuity; interested only in freedom, profligacy, and high-jinks, railing against any limitation or commitment whatsoever.
In truth, we were bored, so very bored, so continually bored.
Birds being distrustful of our ilk.
Any admiration we might once have felt for their endurance had long since devolved into revulsion.
The crowd, having suspended its perversities, stood gaping at Mr. Bevins, who had acquired, in the telling, such a bounty of extra eyes, ears, noses, hands, etc., that he now resembled some overstuffed fleshly bouquet. Bevins applied his usual remedy (closing the eyes and stopping as many of the noses and ears as he could with the various extra hands, dulling, thereby, all sensory intake, thus quieting the mind) and multiple sets of the eyes, ears, noses, and hands retracted or vanished (I could never tell which).
Walk-skimming between (or over, when unavoidable) the former home-places of so many fools no longer among us.
These were a chirpy, tepid, desireless sort, generally, and had lingered, if at all, for only the briefest of moments, so completely satisfactory had they found their tenure in that previous place.
The two now comprised one sitting man, Mr. Vollman's greater girth somewhat overflowing the gentleman, his massive member existing wholly outside the gentleman, pointing up at the moon.
The dead at Donelson, sweet Jesus. Heaped and piled like threshed wheat, one on top of two on top of three. I walked through it after with a bad feeling. Lord it was me done that, I thought.
The dead lay as they had fallen, in every conceivable shape, some grasping their guns as though they were in the act of firing, while others, with a cartridge in their icy grasp, were in the act of loading. Some of the countenances wore a peaceful, glad smile, while on others rested a fiendish look of hate. It looked as though each countenance was the exact counterpart of the thoughts that were passing through the mind when the death messenger laid them low. Perhaps that noble-looking youth, with his smiling up-turned face, with his glossy ringlets matted with his own life-blood, felt a mother's prayer stealing over his senses as his young life went out. Near him lay a young husband with a prayer for his wife and little one yet lingering on his lips. Youth and age, virtue and evil, were represented on those ghastly countenances. Before us lay the charred and blackened remains of some who had been burnt alive. They were wounded so badly to move and the fierce elements consumed them.
(So why grieve? The worst of it, for him, is over.) Because I loved him so and am in the habit of loving him and that love must take the form of fussing and worry and doing.
Mr. Vollman bearing his tremendous member in his hands, so as not to trip himself on it.
Some blows fall too heavy upon those too fragile.
Regarding a face & carriage so uniquely arranged by Nature, one's opinion of it seemed to depend more than usual on the predisposition of the Observer.
Oh, the pathos of it!—haggard, drawn into fixed lines of unutterable sadness, with a look of loneliness, as of a soul whose depth of sorrow and bitterness no human sympathy could ever reach. The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world.
Strange, isn't it? To have dedicated one's life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one's life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one's labors utterly forgotten?
Well, what of it. No one who has ever done anything worth doing has gone uncriticized.
He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, was always bound to return to nothingness. Only I did not think it would be so soon. Or that he would precede us. Two passing temporarinesses developed feelings for one another.
The thousand dresses, laid out so reverently that afternoon, flecks of dust brushed off carefully in doorways, hems gathered up for the carriage trip: where are they now? Are some yet saved in attics? Most are dust. As are the women who wore them so proudly in that transient moment of radiance. (7%)
Trap. Horrible trap. At one's birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. That baby also must depart. All pleasure sshuld be tainted with that knowledge. But hopeful, dear us, we forget. (46%)
Strange, isn't it? To have dedicated one's life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one's life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one's labors utterly forgotten? (60%)
He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, was always bound to return to nothingness. (70%)
We were that way at the time, and had been led to that place not by any innate evil in ourselves, but by the state of cognition and our experiences up until that moment. (78%)
At the core of each lay suffering, our eventual end, the many losses we must experince on the way to that end. (87%)
Must end suffering by causing more suffering. (88%)
He was an open book. An opening book. That had just been opened up somewhat wider. By sorrow. And -- by us. By all of us, black and white... (89%)
Last words
And we rode forward into the night, past the sleeping houses of our countrymen. thomas havens
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. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy's body. 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.
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Unread I hold it, a new Saunders book is come. My evening expands. (SomeGuyInVirginia)
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