There are real technical flaws in the writing, mostly related to pacing. And this is an undeniably serious book, one that tells a story which passes through almost every issue of vital present importance, from Korean history to immigration, race, the treatment of women, gay rights, and even the practices of large multinational banks.īut I found that the individual stories within the massive sweep of generations often didn’t capture me as much as I’d like. For better or worse, a 500-page book demands to be taken more seriously than a 150-page book. A book of this length gains dramatic weight merely from how much it covers. Pachinko is expansive, carrying us through some 90 years and several generations. It also serves as a powerful thesis statement not just for this novel, but also the other novel under consideration today, and probably for the concept of history itself. Pachinko starts us off with one hell of a first sentence: “History has failed us, but no matter.”īoth the fact and the sentiment of this sentence rang incredibly true for me as a Jewish person, as I’m sure it does for any number of groups that history has failed. I say this because these books both, in their own ways, strike me as Important Books, and that definitely was in my mind when making this decision. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I read an ad for Lincoln in the Bardo on one of my podcasts.” He co-wrote, with Jeffrey Cranor, the novels Welcome to Night Vale and It Devours! He is also the author of the upcoming Alice Isn’t Dead novel. Among the graveyard’s permanent guests - a teeming mass that includes a stern, eloquent reverend, a dreamy young man driven to suicide by a lover’s rejection, a perpetually sloshed married couple, and a dandyish trio of top-hatted bachelors - only one receives a regular visitor: Little Willie, whose devastated father returns to his crypt nightly to hold the boy in his arms, even as he struggles to accept that “the essential thing (that which was borne, that which we loved) is gone.Joseph Fink is the creator of Welcome to Night Vale, Alice Isn’t Dead, and I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats. Dozens of souls trapped somewhere between this mortal coil and whatever lies on the other side, they’re dearly (and often messily) departed but don’t know it, emerging from the coffins they call “sickboxes” to fret and wander and obsessively recount the unfinished business left behind. While Bardo (a Tibetan term for the liminal state between life and death) bears Abraham Lincoln’s name and is inspired by a lesser-known episode in his life - the loss of 11-year-old Willie, his youngest and most beloved child, to typhoid - it uses him mostly as a supporting player, a living link to the vast cast of characters that populate the cemetery in which nearly all of the narrative is set.
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