Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Tuesday, March 26, 2024--San Antonio

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson is an unusual novel that was named one of the top 10 fiction novels of the past decade by TIME.  What makes it different is that it involves multiple versions of the protagonist's (Ursula's) life story and the way that minor changes may affect the future--sometimes significantly, but sometimes not so.  Ursula is born into an upper-middle class family in England in 1910.  The story restarts over and over with a concentration on the ability of Ursula to recall incidents from the future in the previous versions of the story (sort of a reverse deja vu situation) allowing her to make alternative decisions in the retelling.  The early part of the book covers her birth, the shooting in Sarajevo, and WWI setting the stage for understanding the retelling-aspect of the alternative life choices Ursula makes in the repeated versions.  The majority of the book then involves revised versions of stories regarding her life during WWII.  It's a complicated book--not only because of keeping track of the revisions but also due to the vocabulary I didn't know and the frequent quotations/statements in various languages beyond English (Latin, Italian, German, etc.).  Fortunately, I read the book on a Kindle, and the touch of an unknown word would often give a pop-up definition and it wasn't necessary to be able to translate the foreign language usage.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.