by Paolo Cairoli
The following interview is published by Calibano #7 – The turn of the screw/dove abita la paura
In contemporary American literature, when it comes to fear and horror, George Saunders is not usually the first name that comes to mind. And yet, few short story writers – whose only foray into the novel won the Booker Prize in 2017 and is titled Lincoln in the Bardo have been able to portray our reality as inhabitants of digital capitalism, shifting it into an elsewhere just slightly distorted and deeply unsettling, serving as a warning for a future that is more than imminent.
In the stories published this year under the title Liberation Day, we find on stage puppets programmed for the amusement of their creator, men and women stripped of every mental activity to make them manipulable, employees of theme parks assigned to embody a historical figure: in short, incarnations of slavery in the digital age.
Lincoln in the Bardo, on the other hand, is set during the American Civil War. At the center of the narrative is Abraham Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son, Willie, who, buried in a crypt in Oak Hill Cemetery, is immediately surrounded by a crowd of spirits. Saunders constructed the novel as a montage of voices, all coming from people we would call “dead,” but to whom Tibetan Buddhism assigns a transitional period between the past life and the future one: the Bardo, precisely, from which the book’s title derives. All the voices alternating on the stage of the novel belong to people whose consciousness has separated from their body and whose mind has acquired a consistency of its own, one that not only travels through space but can also penetrate the bodies of others or resettle in their own. These are suffering spirits, because according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead they do not accept the separation from their earthly existence.
The Metropolitan Opera House has in fact commissioned an opera based on Lincoln in the Bardo from composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek, and “Calibano” had the opportunity to meet Saunders and talk with him about life, death, and other little things.
Traditionally, it is we, the living, who summon ghosts—we are the ones who need them. In Lincoln in the Bardo, however, it seems to be the ghosts—if we can even call them that—who need us. What are they seeking? What is it they cannot let go of?
My understanding of that world was that the ghosts feel (correctly) that the living have forgotten about them, that they are no longer valid in the world of the living. I read somewhere that the dead like to have their photos displayed, like to be discussed and remembered. So, that played out in the book as well, especially in the way that the dead responded to the presence of the (living) Abraham Lincoln among them. Life, for these dead, was, you know – the best thing that ever happened to them, and they can’t believe it’s all over now.
The inhabitants of the Bardo seem terrified by their condition, by no longer being part of the world. They can’t even bring themselves to name it. What were you trying to suggest with that?
A deep sense of denial, I guess. As if, for certain people, the moment of death is just too much to bear – they feel that have so much left to do, or things to rectify, that the idea of being invalid forever stops them in their tracks and makes them explain things in a different way – they are sick, they are to wait here, etc. But, always, they feel that they will once again get a chance to be alive and…tidy everything up.
Beyond fear, the relationship between the living and the dead in your book also seems marked by frustration. Each side reaches for the other, yet there is no real possibility of mutual contact…
Well, that was one of the central questions the book would end up asking: in this (fictive) world, could there be any meaningful contact between the dead and the living? At first, they think not. Then Lincoln comes and seems to love the dead boy and their hopes are raised. Then they inhabit Lincoln with (they think) no result, and they revert to the negative answer. But then (at least in my reading of the book) we see the former slave Thomas Havens occupying Lincoln, and vowing to try to make Lincoln understand the plight of Black people in America. He notes that Lincoln has, in fact, been changed by the collective sadness of all of those ghosts who occupied him. And we know from history that not long after that night, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves. So, at least in this invented world, the cause-and-effect would argue that there actually was some mutual contact between the dead and the living: the dead filled Lincoln with their sorrow and opened up.
In any case, everyone seems governed by a form of egoism that underlies their frustration. All of them—living and non-living alike—are preoccupied with what they still want. Lincoln longs to hold his son again, while the boy darts back and forth frantically, desperate to be seen in his new form. All this seems to draw attention away from the greater tragedy: the death of the child. How did you conceive this tension?
I thought of these desires as forms of what, in physics, is called potential energy. Lincoln’s love gets converted to grief, and that takes the form of him looking for any way to still “have” his son. Willie’s interrupted expectation of a full life takes the form of his refusal to leave the bardo realm and “go on.” It’s kind of like if a person was leaning heavily against a wall and then the wall disappeared – the energy of the leaning is still there, and sends the person hurtling towards the ground.
In the final pages of the book, Lincoln appears to turn to his responsibilities as a way to save himself—he has many things to do, and we are led to believe that these duties will help him survive the tragedy. While writing, did you ever wonder whether the mind can truly overcome the “scandal” of losing a child?
I don’t think it can, not really. When I was writing the book, it occurred to me that love and grief are the same thing. So: lots of love, lots of grief. (The harder one leans, the harder one falls.) I think Lincoln reasons his way back into action; the big moment is when he finally sees that the body of his son is not his son and therefore all of this clinging to the physical form is delusional. One thing I learned about Lincoln in my research was that he was a very logical person, who reasoned, sometimes, in a quite syllogistic way. So that kind of thinking gets him out of the crypt and then, in the chapel, Willie (also reasoning logically, from his “review” of Lincoln’s memories) leaves Lincoln’s body – which frees Lincoln up even more and off he goes, back to his duties. So, I saw it all as a sort of step-wise process, the two of them working together toward the truth.
Lincoln in the Bardo is being adapted into an opera by composer Missy Mazzoli. What is your relationship to this art form? Do you think it might add something to the literary dimension of the work?
I love opera and actually, as I was writing the book, I had a sort of operatic vision of it – a few sets, lots of voices, big drama, and so on. So, I’m thrilled about it and can’t think of a better composer than Missy to take it on. Her work has so many flavors – lyrical and edgy and even, at times, funny. So I felt a real kinship with her artistic vision. We met for the first time in New York and had a wonderful conversation – it was like talking to myself in so many ways – we really “clicked” on our vision of what we hoped the work would be.
In another of her works, The Listeners, Missy Mazzoli masterfully evokes a sound that only the protagonist and a few others can hear—imbuing it with a sense of otherness and estrangement. Did you ever imagine a specific acoustic or sonic atmosphere, distinct from that of the real world, surrounding the ghostly context of your book?
Not really, just because I don’t really have a very vivid musical imagination. For me, collaboration is about finding the right person (passionate, virtuosic, who loves the book) and then just setting them loose/wishing them the best. That way, instead of me, a bad musician, imposing my ideas, we have a master, approaching it with complete abandon and freedom.
What challenges do you think a stage adaptation of your novel might face?
The main thing is that the book has a LOT of narration – from historical sources and so on. But Royce Vavrek, the librettist, has done a beautiful job of finding the essential (dramatic) story within the book, and this made the libretto very fast and emotional.
In Liberation Day, the society you describe is driven by surveillance, the commodification of entertainment, enforced order, and illusion. It borders on horror, yet it also echoes many aspects of our contemporary world. What first inspired these stories, and where do you think this state of affairs—already partly realized—is heading?
I’m not really a big believer in “inspiration,” per se. The way it works for me is, I live in the culture with as much curiosity and openness as I can, trying not to judge it much, but just to really see it, trusting that once I get started on a story all of that will appear, in the writing,somehow. My process involves a lot of rewriting, which I’ve come to see as a way to let the subconscious gradually appear in the work. Often, I finish something (lots of polishing and changing and so on) and then think: “Oh, so that’s how I feel.” So: more exploration, less preaching, would be the intention.Having said that, I think you are exactly right. The way in which we communicate has, not surprisingly, started to change us, and I think we are becoming more materialist in our thinking and feeling; more literal, less open, more judgemental, less loving. It’s all a natural outcome of this constant influx of what is essentially a form of propaganda – “for” corporations, against ambiguity, intent on forming us into tribes, for reasons of profit. And it’s not as if there are certain diabolical people who are for this – no one is for it, except the system itself, by which we have become too conditioned (again, by our materialist way of thinking) to effectively resist.
Our entertainment, now almost entirely digitalized, has become the prime site of control. In your stories, it is often the sudden resurfacing of a long-forgotten life that offers a chance for redemption. And yet, in your writing, this is never portrayed nostalgically. What were you trying to suggest instead?
Well, I think that, rather than being nostalgic, such a moment is a moment of encountering, again, the real, you know? You have an image of some grass on a bigscreen TV – and then you go outside and lie facedown in a field of grass. Those are both “valid” moments of perception but the latter is more sense-involving and so, to me, “better.” So, these characters are being fed a version of reality that serves someone else, but every now and then they remember a time when they were just themselves, in the real world. And the stories ask, I suppose: 1) which do you prefer and 2) are you willing to do what it takes to get back to that real world?
A phrase I think about a lot is “authentic relation.” In this world, someone from afar is always speaking to us – on a podcast, or in an advertisement or news broadcast (or in an interview of a writer in a magazine, ha ha). And there’s nothing wrong with any of that but I do wonder about our sense of proportion. What does it do to a human mind and a human heart to be continually, disproportionately, addressed by someone far away, for reasons that may have a complicated agenda. So, part of our work as contemporary people, I think, is to look at these different sources critically, and accept some and reject others and try our best to regulate the proportion of primary vs secondary (mediated) inputs, just so we can stay sane and be less agitated and more open to feelings of tenderness and love.
George Saunders (1958, Amarillo, Texas) is an American writer. He has published short stories, essays, and a novel, winning the Booker Prize in 2017 with Lincoln in the Bardo. He regularly contributes to The New Yorker and teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. In 2025 he won the National Book Award.
Calibano is the new magazine of the Rome Opera House. Created as a space for in-depth analysis and debate around topical issues raised from the performances on the theater’s program and realized in collaboration with the publishing house effequ, the editorial project involves, every four months, the publication and distribution in Italian bookstores of a monographic volume dedicated to an opera title and a related theme, through the commissioning of essays, short stories and reviews by authoritative signatures.
You can buy Calibano on the effequ website at this link, in bookstores and at the Rome Opera House shop.
The illustrations and the cover in this issue were made by Oona Ode.
