There is fashion for people. There is fashion for catwalks. There is EXPERIMENTAL fashion for catwalks. These three worlds do not overlap. The first world is to be worn, and to be worn for pleasure. The second is to admire from afar, not too eager to put it on. The third is to show off, even the fashion designer doesn't think anyone will want to wear it.
Should the average person put on experimental models just because fashion magazines are full of admiring reviews from the shows? Should the average person try on experimental outfits just because they have won some sort of prize in the world of high fashion?
That seems to be the way the world of fiction entertainment books looks. There are books we read for pleasure. Intellectual, perhaps. More often, emotionally. And yet, it is precisely for DEFINITION.
But there are books that are EXPERIMENTED with something for a reason. They are written to play with words, to show off, to win a few accolades from refined aesthetes, to win some kind of book award. These books are no fun. Their fate is to rest forever on the shelves of naive readers who believed in this tinsel.
George Saunders was born December 2, 1958 and raised on the south side of Chicago. In 1981 he received a B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He worked at Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, NY as a technical writer and geophysical engineer from 1989 to 1996. He has also worked in Sumatra on an oil exploration geophysics crew, as a doorman in Beverly Hills, a roofer in Chicago, a convenience store clerk, a guitarist in a Texas country-and-western band, and a knuckle-puller in a West Texas slaughterhouse.
"Lincoln in the Bardo." - of such experiments. You don't get reader's pleasure from them.
What can I get reader's pleasure from? Plot. I want plot. I want a story. What else? Characters. I want vivid characters with some development. What else? I want the world. I want to immerse myself in the world of the book, to dissolve in it, to feel myself there.
"Lincoln in the Bardo" offers none of that. With each new page, I felt more and more lost. Vague glimpses of Ionesco and Beckett thundered in my head. This book goes from one extreme (the thesis) to the other (short moralistic essays), it's full of quotes from "other" sources, and then suddenly there's something like a play... Ghosts come and ghosts go. They each have their own little micro-story, but there is no connection between the stories. Some ghosts appear more often than others - they play the role of narrators, trying with enviable persistence to move the paltry plot (or rather, its absence) forward. Then there are those who offer something like deeply personal stories in a biblical style. There are some stories that sparkle with diamonds in the midst of this quagmire, but there are very few diamonds.
No, after this book I will no longer be dragged into reading "alternative literature" or "plot told in a different way. I already know what these expressions mean - no plot, no characters, just experimental wordplay. Apparently not destined to make my way into the aesthetes. And as an average reader I barely made it through this book.
This is not a historical novel. It is not a novel at all. It is a series of short, barely connected paragraphs. It is not a book about Lincoln. It has no plot at all. I see reviews in which people say they have felt to the point of tears the grief rising from these pages, but I didn't feel any of that. I just saw a succession of ghosts talking about whatever their heart desires. All I saw were quotations-some real, some made-up-and that, too, was annoying: either make all the quotations real, or write a fiction novel, literally! If Saunders had published his occasional notes from his notebook, notes to notes, and corrections to notes to notes, it would have been the same thing. They say there are more than 160 of these understatements mixed into the novel--not characters, not characters, just some source of words.
The text is extremely difficult to comprehend. It is EXPERIMENTAL, and that says it all. The events of the novel take place on one night, when a certain man, called "Abraham Lincoln" by Saunders, comes to the grave of his dead son. The bardo is a Buddhist concept, a place between death and rebirth. All the inhabitants of the cemetery exist in the bardo, and it is they who create this messy cacophony of short stories.
Written all this is so innovative that there is no doubt: this is innovation for the sake of innovation, experimentation for the sake of experimentation, showing off for the praise of aesthetes. Everything gets mixed up in your head, nothing and no one to remember, a single thread does not form - and it does not matter, because the plot is still no. There are no emotions, no page painted with feelings, there is no sense of belonging - I mean, each reader, knowing the subject (the death of a child), can come up with his own emotion, but it will be an emotion coming from the reader, not from the book. As a result, the novel becomes just a visceral text in which the main idea is don't worry, don't sweat it, what happened is what happened. Or, if you prefer, "everything will pass."
Even the beautiful language of the author is sometimes perceived as just another area for lashing out. Beauty is, after all, also happens to be different, sometimes the extravagance is simply inappropriate.
The first half of the book, you read these extravagances, looking at the outlandish format, you get used to a succession of stories, in general, working. In the second half, having already read, examined, accustomed, figured out, you get bored. There is no pleasure anywhere, ever. There is no pleasure in this novel.
To whom would you recommend these words, folded into paragraphs? Probably those who sincerely consider themselves book aesthetes. This category of readers are a priori obliged to love this book - it's like loving contemporary artists: no one understands them, and you just adore them! Probably can also be recommended to those who are attracted to form, to whom form is important, for whom the form - the value in itself. If you fall into one of those categories, this book is for you. More than that, it's a pretty great book. It's just that the range of people who can enjoy it is VERY narrow.
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