Book Review | George Saunders' 'Liberation Day' is a parable for our times

The nine stories in 'Liberation Day' examine the theme of being imprisoned. (Photo: Denny Müller via Unsplash)

Liberation Day is the latest collection of short stories by George Saunders, a celebrated American short-story writer whose debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, won the 2017 Booker Prize. Unusual in its narrative style, Lincoln in the Bardo was told in a gamut of voices — tragic, funny, individual, collective — speaking from the distant margins, that is the spirit world. Bardo, according to Tibetan Buddhism, is the limbo between life, death and afterlife that souls in their bodiless state pass through.  Yes, dead people encoffined in a graveyard — in this book, 166 of them — do speak. Naturally, love, loss, mourning, being trapped and letting go are the themes of the novel that resembles, albeit superficially, a historical fiction. It is also about President Abraham Lincoln’s grief over the death of his 11-year-old son, Willie, who died of typhoid fever, in 1862, when the American nation was one year into the Civil War.

You are trapped in 'You'

'Liberation Day' (2022), Bloomsbury Publishing, 257 pages, Rs 599 (paperback).

In a sense, the nine stories in Liberation Day continue to examine the same theme — mainly, of being imprisoned — but in a more contemporary, subversive and disturbing way. For instance, the titular story is set in a dystopian future where a Company of disenfranchised poor are slaves to the whims of a wealthy man, Mr Untermeyer, who uses them as Speakers pinioned to a Wall, somewhat like puppets, to enact Custer’s Last Stand from the legendary Battle of Little Big Horn (June 25–26, 1876), for the entertainment of his friends. Meanwhile, his wife, Mrs U, secretly uses the first-person narrator of the story, Jeremy, to whisper to her as she self-pleasures in the "Listening Room". "Speaking of her Beauty so often, with such high Specificity, made her Beauty real to me," says Jeremy, going on to add, "She rarely speaks to me, I do not know her heart. Does she have love for me? When I am not Speaking to her?" While the frequent use of capitals is meant to underline the feeling of abuse that exists in this dystopia, it also has the effect of confusing the reader. To make sense of it, one has to read the entire story twice, at least — once for the narrative flow and next for the technique. Only then does one appreciate its cutting-edge quality.

Love — its power, absurdity and quirkiness — is a frequent theme in several of the stories.  "Sparrow", a shorter, lighter, more conventional tale is about a shopping assistant who, having no views of her own, is trite in all her responses. Predictably, she falls in love with the son of the store owner, a female with " a strongly self-certain  lightning bolt of constant opining". Looking for ways to attract him, she starts having opinions of her own, which lands her in trouble with the boss lady.

"My House" is about a home buyer who falls head-over-heels for a house on sale. "Here one felt — craftsmanship, yes, but also, my God — the past, the living past: the parties, the food served, the dust motes of 1862, the war goodbyes of 1917, the whispered late-night dramas that had forever altered the lives of the people who’d once moved down these very hallways and now lay buried in the village graveyard I’d visited on the way over." Yet, this seemingly conformist tale gains the philosophical heft of a parable when the house owner, though penniless, inexplicably, refuses to sell, leaving the prospective buyer-narrator puzzled, distraught, angry and finally reconciled. Addressing the owner, he says, "My idea of your wrongness will go with me. Your rightness is an idea you are having. It will go with you."
While internal monologue is a frequently used device and one at which Saunders excels, he also uses it to project multiple points of view, making these stories not just about slices of life but the total sum of it. In "Mother’s Day", a tale that stands out as perfect, two elderly women who once loved the same man though in very different ways — one was married to him, while he had an adulterous relationship with the other — meet in the middle of a hailstorm and come to an existential weighing-up of their choices and the impact these had on their familial relationships. In the finale, as one of them dies, she reflects on her life, "She was what she was. No one could blame her. As long as she was Alma, she’d be mad. She had a right. Did she want to be mad? No. What she wanted to be was her, younger. Her, non-mad. Her, not yet mad."

Presenting a real world

The exploration of multiple viewpoints underlines the complex nature of even the most mundane relationships. In "A Thing At Work", the mild rivalry between two women employees in an office, for their male boss’s attention, flares up when one reports the other to him for stealing coffee sachets. The accused retaliates. A full-scale war is on. The hapless boss in the cross-fire is left with no choice but to let go the first thief. "He had kids. He had a mortgage. This was the real world."

The real world is brought home to us most effectively in "Love Letter", a communication from a grandfather to his grandson, dated 202_, about a developing situation regarding immigration. Clearly a political commentary on the Trump era, it resonates everywhere. "Because this destruction was emanating from such an inept source, who seemed (at that time) merely comically thuggish, who seemed to know so little about that which he was disrupting and because life was going on, and because he/ they burst through some new gate of propriety, we soon found that no genuine outrage was available to us anymore."

Saunders’ short stories are not simple reads. A few like "Elliott Spencer", about an 89-year-old who is brainwashed to become a political protestor, are downright inaccessible. Yet, for those who seek short stories with wit, intelligence, absurdity, compassion and grace, this collection is just right.