Link to our Facebook Page
Link to our Instagram Page
Link to our X Page
Link to our Youtube Page

“Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson

Recently two or three friends whose opinions I trust recommended “Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson. It’s been a popular book group selection, a novel about a woman is reincarnated several times, set in the first half of the twentieth century in England and Germany. For me, it’s the third book I’ve read in a very short time span that addresses the Nazi era.

In the book’s opening scene, Ursula Todd enters a bar and shoots Adolf Hitler. In the second, she is born and dies immediately. In the third, she is born and lives. As Ursula’s story moves along, she is reincarnated several times and is able to avert tragedies that happened in previous lives. She always feels somewhat apart from others, experiencing fierce deja vu and vivid premonitions.

In Kate Atkinson’s capable hands, this works. Much of the story centers on Ursula’s family and a small circle of friends. Her relationship to them seems not to evolve significantly with each new life. A second aspect of the novel involves Ursula and World War II, when she experiences some lives in London before and during the Blitz, others in Germany in Hitler’s social circles.

An omniscient narrator tells the stories, ending each life usually with the phrase, “darkness fell.” The distance of the narrator contrasts with the intensity of Ursula’s unique experience.

Although I absolutely believe that this novel works well, I’ve been slightly reluctant to recommend it to others, partly because the whole reincarnation idea seems too fantasy-like, too made-up. Perhaps I’m not willing enough to follow a novelist down the path of “What if the world were different in THIS way….”

Even so, I see this as an excellent book group choice. It covers so many bases–family relationships, the World War II era, the role of women, and the meaning of mortality. “Life After Life” invites readers to reconsider a basic idea of how our world works, and then to ponder how countless ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, rest on that one idea.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>