Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good news in the bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

This is Michael Silverblad, and you're listening to Bookworm from the studios of KCRW.

I'm talking today to George Saunders.

This is the second week that we're talking about his, I think, great novel, Lincoln and the

Bardo.

It really makes a bid to enter the ranks of American literature by which I mean that it's trying to be as audacious as Whitman in speaking for everyone,

as astounding, as Melville, in speaking across racial lines and the human animal divide.

In this book, that divide is between life and death.

But by the end of this book, we're hearing a vast chorus.

We're in the bardo, which is a place between the end of life and the beginning of the next life. According to the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

there are, I think, six Bardot experiences as the being, as the spirit progresses through its refining education.

In this book, A Child Has Died, Abraham Lincoln's child, Willie. And as we go through the book,

the awareness that we've witnessed the death of the child, that the child is irreclaimable by life,

that you don't move backwards, that you keep moving forwards, and that morning is almost like

rooting for the movement forward. And here we're being reminded of who we are mourning, of why we are mourning, and what we're mourning.

These lines are most of them separate lines.

They're spoken by individual characters in the bardo,

in the cemetery, which they refuse to regard as a cemetery.

...