Great characters. A spooky graveyard setting. Questions of sin and redemption. Historical resonance. The transcendent power of love. This book has it all. The "bardo," as some Buddhists call the transitional state between life and death, in Saunders' vision is not very different from our world: a place where people can be so blinded by their own heart's desire that they do not see what is truly good for either themselves or others. It's when they can break out of that narrow view that salvation is possible. I don't know if the "real" Abraham Lincoln was the man both great and good Saunders has created. But I want him to be, because as that he is the best example of how I should live my own small life. This is the power of literature: to give us heroes who are, always and timelessly, worthy of our emulation.Publisher's description:
From the seed of historical truth that is the death of President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son Willie, George Saunders spins a story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm ... 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.
This book was my introduction to Toews' work and I'm hooked. Her memoir is a response (or non-response) to the prompt "Why do I write?" It is powerful, exquisitely detailed, and takes you on a journey through loss and tragedy with lots of humor. I also learned a lot about wind. You must read it for yourself! For anyone who has lost someone close to them and is working through it...
Publisher description:
Why do you write? the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, 'A Truce That Is Not Peace' explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane -- this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.
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