Vigil
A Novel
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A scorching portrait of modern America. And yet it also brings a sense of sense of hope, not only because [it] reminds us how powerful a great novel can be, but because of the sense . . . that a universal justice will prevail.”—R. J. Palacio for Time, “25 Books That Capture This American Moment”
A “spectacular” (Los Angeles Times) novel from the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next
“Vibrant, fiendishly clever . . . Vigil is pure Saunders: the death of empathy, he insists, is greatly exaggerated.”—The Boston Globe
Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.
She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?
Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.
With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A ghost attempts to guide an unrepentant oil executive toward redemption and the afterlife in the staggering latest from Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo). The story takes place over the course of one night, when the spirit of Jill Blaine descends to Earth and takes on human form at the home of K.J. Boone, her latest "charge." As opposed to the hundreds of others Jill has visited at the end of their days, the terminally ill Boone is uninterested in finding peace or reckoning with his misdeeds. Instead, he revels in his accomplishments, taking credit for the U.S.'s decision to abandon the Kyoto Protocol, which one of his lobbyists ridiculed as the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Crap" for "greenies with hostile agendas." A fiery French colleague of Jill's shows up to help, repeatedly crying "Quelle horreur!" as he tries to convince Boone of the devastating effects of climate change by showing him specimens of endangered bird species felled by wildfire smoke. Alone with Jill, Boone recalls his childhood, his experiences as a "Wyoming hick" at college in Michigan, and his defiant rise to power, during which he came to be unfairly seen, in his view, as "the villain... the principal baddy." What emerges is not a simple story of redemption, though. As more of Boone's transgressions are revealed, Jill decides she hates him, and the novel barrels into gleefully absurd territory while posing weighty questions about salvation and justice and whether they're even feasible. Saunders has outdone himself with this endlessly irreverent work of art.
