Most members seemed to enjoy Life After Life very much, although there was some disagreement about what was happening in the book. What are we to make of all these lives relived? One member was of the opinion that we all experience deja vu and that the character was simply exploring "what if this had happened" in her own mind.
Another member, who had been to see the movie Interstellar, was convinced the book was about multiverses - the theory of infinite possible universes or parallel universes - and the same life lived differently in each one (with hints to the character of other lives and outcomes through deja vu or second sight).
At any rate, the author does a wonderful and exhausting job in writing the life of Ursula, the main character, so many times and in so many ways. (She seems to get tired, herself - hinted at when one life ends with: "Darkness, and so on.")
Incidentally, Ursula has her own opinion of what's going on, expressed to her psychiatrist in one lifetime, that her life was a ‘palimpsest’ (I had to look this up) - which refers to something like a manuscript page from which the text has been either scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused for another document. (One member made a joke that - to damn with faint praise one could describe how a creative work was a real Palimpsest - but I digress.)
Interestingly, Ursula also draws a snake biting its tail for the psychiatrist which one member has identified as an ‘ouroboros’, or mythical creative signifying something constantly recreating itself. The psychiatrist also talks about reincarnation but then confusingly about ‘amor fati’, or the acceptance or embrace of one's fate and the rejection of the idea that anything could or should have unfolded differently.
This may just be the author teasing the reader but she does suggest that other characters are also spinning different lives or reincarnations in the book, when in one of Ursula's lifetimes, Mother Sylvia handily has a pair of silver manicure scissors in her bedside drawer to cut the cord around her new baby's neck - and the poor midwife, who we never really get to know, has a number of misadventures many times over in never arriving to assist Sylvia in labour. It is also interesting that some lives don't seem to deviate at all, as if the characters, even those like Izzy with misspent youths, have worked out how things should be done properly.
In case this all sounds too heavy, the book is magical in numerous ways for its wonderful descriptions of family life (including that of several loved pet animals - did you like the rabbit joke about Australia?), the great one-liners and jokes about unfavourite food and misquotes, the believable descriptions of the terror of life in the Blitz and hardship in post- war London, the snippets of the personal life of Hitler and Eva Braun, and so on and on.
If you were as sorry to leave life in Fox Corner as I was, apparently the author is bringing out a sequel of sorts called God in Ruins, so watch out for that.
Just as an aside, one member at our February meeting also reviewed Rome by Robert Hughes which he said was good in parts, like the curate's egg. He dismissed Hughes' history of Imperial Rome as inadequate (one member at the meeting also dismissed Hughes as inadequate, but I digress again) but quite liked the sections on Renaissance art and Italian art movements up to the Futurist movement when he lost interest.
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