Life After Life
I was hoping for something a little lighter after All the Light We Cannot See, so I picked up this book about a woman who keeps living her life over and over, trying to get it right. Little did I know that I was diving into another depressing WWII novel, One that proved to be even more frustrating.
The frustration comes from the fact that it's not clear how much Ursula remembers from her previous lives, or how much control she really has. Sometimes the changes that allow her to live a little longer are entirely out of her control - a man rescues her from drowning or the power comes back on before she freezes. Other times she seems to be architect of her own destiny, trying over and over to avoid catching influenza until she finally hits upon a solution.
As her lives go on, she seems to remember more and that helps her make better decisions. But it can also be frustrating how much she doesn't remember, how little she learns from life to life. She always makes new mistakes, but she often makes them for the same reasons. And when there are no consequences then she never learns from them at all.
And then there's the tag line, which implies that she keeps living her life until she gets it right. In the beginning, this seems to mean that she needs to kill Hitler before he can rise to power. But the book doesn't end there. It ends when she finally orchestrates a situation where her younger brother gets to marry his childhood sweetheart. Which implies that her purpose in life is to make her younger brother happy. Which is kind of gross.
But again, it's unclear how much she remembers, what triggers those memories, how much control she has, and how much is just the random static of the universe pushing her this way or that. The result is a book that feels both inconsistent and repetitive. It was fun to read, but it left me with entirely too many questions about what the author was trying to say
The frustration comes from the fact that it's not clear how much Ursula remembers from her previous lives, or how much control she really has. Sometimes the changes that allow her to live a little longer are entirely out of her control - a man rescues her from drowning or the power comes back on before she freezes. Other times she seems to be architect of her own destiny, trying over and over to avoid catching influenza until she finally hits upon a solution.
As her lives go on, she seems to remember more and that helps her make better decisions. But it can also be frustrating how much she doesn't remember, how little she learns from life to life. She always makes new mistakes, but she often makes them for the same reasons. And when there are no consequences then she never learns from them at all.
And then there's the tag line, which implies that she keeps living her life until she gets it right. In the beginning, this seems to mean that she needs to kill Hitler before he can rise to power. But the book doesn't end there. It ends when she finally orchestrates a situation where her younger brother gets to marry his childhood sweetheart. Which implies that her purpose in life is to make her younger brother happy. Which is kind of gross.
But again, it's unclear how much she remembers, what triggers those memories, how much control she has, and how much is just the random static of the universe pushing her this way or that. The result is a book that feels both inconsistent and repetitive. It was fun to read, but it left me with entirely too many questions about what the author was trying to say
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