From the Bookshelf of Read Between the Wines…

Life After Life (Todd Family, #1)

Kate Atkinson

Start date: April 1, 2014

Finish date: April 30, 2014

Discussion: Book Club Discussions

Why we're reading this: This book was nominated by Jason.
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What Members Thought

May 29, 2013 Jason rated it it was ok

Shelves: for-kindle, wine-club, reviewed

I’m rating this book two stars only on a technicality…which is that technically speaking, this book sucks.

Ursula Todd is an English-born nobody. Born into a large wealthy family, there isn’t a whole lot about her that stands out. She shares a closeness with one or two of her siblings, but overall she has a pretty meek personality and remains largely invisible most of her life—with the caveat that “most of her life” in Ursula’s case actually means “most of her lives” because this bitch keeps on d I’m rating this book two stars only on a technicality…which is that technically speaking, this book sucks.

Ursula Todd is an English-born nobody. Born into a large wealthy family, there isn’t a whole lot about her that stands out. She shares a closeness with one or two of her siblings, but overall she has a pretty meek personality and remains largely invisible most of her life—with the caveat that “most of her life” in Ursula’s case actually means “most of her lives” because this bitch keeps on dropping dead and coming back again.

Life After Life is a book that focuses on Ursula’s slow build-up, over the course of multiple lives (because it takes her hundreds of tries to get it right), to assassinating Adolf Hitler. This is not a spoiler, by the way. The assassination occurs on page one. The hundreds of lives it takes for her to get to that point occur on pages two through five hundred twenty-nine. And that includes the following exits, stage left (spoiler alert if you’re a Final Destination fan): umbilical cord strangulation, asphyxiation by natural gas, blunt force trauma by a falling brick wall, blunt force trauma by a homicidal husband, suicide by cyanide capsule, stroke (or whatever the hell that was on the park bench), falling off a roof, Spanish flu, drowning, Blitz bombing. Some of these happen repeatedly because it takes Ursula several lives to figure out that she’s doing something wrong and needs to adjust her strategy. She can’t exactly remember her previous deaths, but she does know something is amiss and can occasionally execute a modification to her preordained path and avoid that outcome...only to have a different mortal outcome occur in its stead, of course. (But truthfully, most of the time the modification occurs on its own without her having to do anything at all. Magic!)

And that is what is most bothersome to me, I think (besides her dull personality). It is exhausting to read about a woman dying over and over again only to be reborn right back where she started, and all without seeming to have any input into anything whatsoever. She just goes along with the program, a plastic bag beaten about by the wind. All the dumb things she has done along the way, all the idiots she enters into relationships with, it all starts over, and then you start to get confused as to who’s alive and who’s dead in this new life of hers and is she still with this person? Is she a mother this time around? A spinster? And then you start to realize that who cares. It doesn’t matter. She’ll just die again anyway. In fact the only time she ever starts to make real decisions is toward the end of the novel after she has lived a ludicrous number of lives, and are we supposed to be at this point rooting for her? What most of us have just one lifetime to figure out she gets hundreds, and even so it’s still not enough? One of my favorite of Ursula’s decisions is that after dying a bunch of times in the Blitz, she decides to spend her next life somewhere safer and moves from London to fucking Munich.

Good grief.

Also, the character interactions, which is something I usually enjoy in novels, is pretty nonexistent here. Characters don’t have meaningful interactions in Life After Life; they merely quip and provide one-liners before the narrative moves onto the next scene (which is often just as dull). Reading this book ultimately became tiresome to me, which is not really how you want your reading experience to go.

Looking at the ratings for this novel it’s clear I’m in the minority, which is why I felt a certain pressure to isolate the components of it that irritated me or caused me to dislike it, but the truth is I don’t really know for sure if it was any of these things in particular or if it was the whole package to blame, but the bottom line is that this book was just not for me. ...more

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May 16, 2013 Gary the Bookworm rated it it was amazing

If Ursula Todd, born during a blizzard at Fox Corner in 1910, the youngest daughter of Sylvie and Hugh, had been from a family of golfers, she might have been named Mulligan. She had the dubious distinction of living a life of do-overs, reshuffling the circumstances until she got it right. Her mother, of the forest, named her, but it was her father, bright of mind and spirit, who always called her his little bear, like the constellation, Ursu Minor. Those who've studied astronomy - or the Romant If Ursula Todd, born during a blizzard at Fox Corner in 1910, the youngest daughter of Sylvie and Hugh, had been from a family of golfers, she might have been named Mulligan. She had the dubious distinction of living a life of do-overs, reshuffling the circumstances until she got it right. Her mother, of the forest, named her, but it was her father, bright of mind and spirit, who always called her his little bear, like the constellation, Ursu Minor. Those who've studied astronomy - or the Romantic poets - know the brightest star, Polaris, is found at its tail and is viewed - by both sailors and lovers - as a reliable guide through stormy seas. Or, as Christina Rossetti put it:

one unchangeable upon a throne
Broods o'er the frozen heart of earth alone,
Content to reign the bright particular star
Of some who wander and of some who groan.

photo 2117B7A8-0A0F-4641-9494-450866511C90_zpsbl6jzqc8.jpg

It may have been a struggle for Ursula to bear (ouch!) such a burden, but for us as readers, in the hands of my current crush/favorite author, Kate Atkinson, it was a compulsively satisfying journey. Among her many incarnations, Ursula became a battered wife and a career woman; an aborted mother and a devoted parent; victims of both the London Blitz and the Allied bombing of Berlin; an assassin and a civil servant. Despite the contradictions in her circumstances, she remained true to herself. She was an embodiment of her family, her community and her country, but also a realist, who accepted the conditions dealt to her by fate; amor fati . This acceptance, however necessary, didn't absolve her from responsibility. She was brave, loyal and loving to those she cared about - expecting the same from them - and fiercely independent, a paragon of modern feminism in the turmoil of the early 20th century.

You can't escape the notion that Atkinson believes that men have made a mess of things, ignoring both history and good sense. Ursula's experience with them was mixed. Her father and her brother, Teddy-another bear-were exemplars, but she wasn't as lucky in love or marriage. The others she encountered, from her older brother Maurice, a bellicose bully who grew up to be a politician, to her German husband, a Nazi, were duplicitous, prone to violence or, in the case of Adolf- the wolf-Hitler, insane. One of her best characters, another sort of Woolf, was described as either a woman of influence or someone who simply refused to take no as an answer. In another situation, Ursula declared that "all that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good women to do nothing." For Ursula, home was an idea, and like Arcadia, it was lost in the past and predicated on something that never existed. The relief which swept over her each time the calendar was reset was a reminder to us that life isn't about becoming, but about being. As Dr Kellet, Ursula's psychiatrist, explained it to her mother, "Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past no present, only the now." Sylvie's response to him is an apt metaphor for this enchanting, lyrical novel about surviving in turbulent times: "How gnomic," she said stiffly. ...more

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Jun 21, 2013 Melanie rated it it was amazing

I loved this book...Not "amazing" as Goodreads 5 stars says but way better than the 4 star "I really liked it". You would think it would get boring and redundant since it's her life over and over but it really made me think and I would catch myself thinking about it at random times, so that's why it deserves 5 stars. It's not overly exciting or action-filled but I loved the attention to detail from chapter to chapter as well as later in the book when some random detail from earlier would appear. ...more

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Apr 02, 2013 Karen rated it it was amazing

This book draws you in slowly when at first a baby is born and dies during the birth. So it goes and with each new life there is a change.

Imagine if you had to live your life over and over until you got it right. With each choice there is a consequence, a shift in what would be.

I don't think there is ever just one moment that, if you were to do over, would make everything better--only different. And maybe some things cannot be changed.

Great book. Really drew me in. Loved the main character, Ur ...more

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Mar 24, 2013 Lori Paximadis rated it it was amazing

I understand some of the hate for this book if you like your stories neat and tidy and linear. But I loved this. It was especially interesting on the heels of Jen Lancaster's Here I Go Again, which did the time travel/pivot point thing in a slightly different but much shallower way. This one, I loved. It really got me thinking about all the tiny things we do every day that can tip the direction of your life one way or another, never mind the larger question that this book brings up about changin ...more

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Jul 04, 2013 Kelly rated it it was amazing

Very well done-- it makes you think about how minor events, if done differently, can change the course of history. I've thought about the possibility of several different realities simultaneously taking place, but never read anything about it. This book is quite unique. ...more

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