LIFE AFTER LIFEBook Review + Discussion [CC]

Hi everyone, today I'm here to do a
review of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. This was my first read of 2016,
and so I thought what better way to start the year than reviewing the first book I
read. And overall I was really happy with it. This book follows a woman named Ursula Todd who from the very first chapter we see, in a quite quick burst of a chapter,
she goes into a bar and shoots Adolf Hitler.

And then from there it goes back
in time to the date of her birth in 1910, and in that first chapter of her birth
she dies, and then the second chapter of her birth which is the following chapter,
she doesn't die. And from there we sort of get these parallel lives of Ursula
Todd where she lives her life in England, either living or dying. And she dies many
times throughout the book hence its title, Life After Life. And we follow this woman as she grows up and she makes choices and we see how those choices shape her
future and then we see in other lives of hers how she doesn't make a certain
choice and how it leads to a different outcome.

Obviously the author is very much playing with the idea of time and sort of the butterfly effect of how one small
choice can you know lead you in a totally different direction. And it
ultimately tries to culminate into this idea of you know if someone can go back
and kill Hitler how would that affect the world that we live in. But I do want
to say from the beginning that first chapter where she shoots Hitler--which I
don't really think as a spoiler, since its the very first chapter--is quite
misleading. The book does not turn into some sort of you know epic training
montage where she's kind of preparing herself to kill Hitler.

It's much more of
contemplation on one woman's life and I. Think that the point author's trying to
make is that if you had the chance to do your life over and over again, would you
do that sort of thing that everyone kind of ruminates on--you know killing Adolf
Hitler--or would you go and change your life to save certain people close to you
or affect your own life. Would you be more selfish and is that what we
expect people to be? Selfless or selfish? In many ways this book I think
is also just sort of a love letter to England. Since it is set during both WWI
and WWII we see Ursula involved in the war rescue during the blitz of London and
some very long and harrowing passages about the sheer trauma that a lot of
these people went through, these innocent lives.

And obviously WWII was a horrific
event for all parties involved, but since the authors english it is definitely focusing
on how the English were attacked by the Germans. She does a really great job of
kind of dragging that out and really showing just how difficult this time
would have been. And in that sense it is very much a comment I think on British
resilience, sort of the stiff upper lip that the British had during this time period. We
see that through, not only Ursula, but also her family and the people she comes in
contact with, specifically her mother who at one point I think literally says you
know we just have to keep going on and we always seem to arrive back at the
same place but we push on.

So in that sense she's sort of playing with
the idea of time in its circular nature especially through Ursula's many lives, but also the British persistence during these wars. And in another sense it is a love letter
to England's countryside and the pastoral. Ursula is raised in a home
called Fox Corner and foxes and other animals player not a big part in the
story but they reappear quite often and had me wondering sort of what they were
there for. Some very beautiful descriptions of the countryside and Ursula has this attachment to 'home.' She splits her time between Fox corner and her homes in London throughout her adult life.

And so we see these parallel worlds and sort of
how one woman interacts with each environment in different ways especially
through her multiple lives. So when she's home at Fox Corner with her family and
surrounded by nature we definitely get that sort of English adoration of the
landscape. At one point she says, "Ursula thought that she would rather die for
Fox Corner (her home) then 'England,' for meadow and copse and the stream that ran through the bluebell wood. Well, that was England wasn't it? The blessed plot." And
that is obviously a reference-- this blessed plot-- to Richard II from
Shakespeare, when John of Gaunt says "this blessed plot, this earth, this England"--
something like that.

So we get a lot of these layers and they kind of build on
each other slowly throughout the novel. It's quite slow but not in the sense
that it isn't paced well. I read it in two days and it was very much a book that I
didn't want to put down. Action-wise, especially thinking about the first chapter of the book, there isn't a lot of it.

You kind of get these repetitions of
Ursula's lives with sort of different outcomes throughout but it isn't
repetitive-- I do credit the author for that because it could have been quite
annoying to constantly be starting life over and over again. As the story
progresses we'll just jump back a few years or just jump to a sort of
parallel universe in the same year. She doesn't constantly start from the very
beginning and go through her whole life again. She chooses what to recap and
what to assume the reader has understood at this point and moves forward from there.

And in the end I thought that it was a difficult conclusion for me because I was a little
bit let down but at the same time the more I reflect on it the more sort of
impressed I am by the story and how many layers there are, how many different lives
and how many different consequences from those lives there are to think about.
And it just had some really beautiful writing in general. There were a lot of
passages that I highlighted. I read it on my Kindle and I think that also may be
why I read it so quickly. But I just highlighted a lot of interesting quotes
and beautiful paragraphs.

Another thing I. Found fascinating about the book was how I interpreted the commentary on agency. Obviously as Ursula is living these
different lives, she doesn't have this explicit understanding of her ability to
live her life over and over again. She just gets these urges and whether or not
she follows those urges impacts the outcome of her life.

So I thought this
was a sort of commentary on wartime women's rights and sort of their
expected jobs and roles in the war: to either get married and serve their
spouse and their children--which is sort of what Ursula's mother expects her to do-- versus women like her Aunt who are very much independent, not always portrayed in the
best light. But when Ursula takes a path in one of her lives, she volunteers
and she contributes to society and she's quite resilient and strong. And in
another life where she gets married and she suffers through that horrific marriage,
she still is quite resilient strong but she just suffered a worse fate in a way.
I don't know if the author is commenting you know on independence versus marriage--
there is a lot of discussion of marriage in this book. Ultimately it left me thinking a lot about women's rights and
how much or how little agency they had.

Ursula is sort of a prime example of that
because she gets to show you and through the authors sort of exercise of giving
her different lives, how much impact these levels of choice and independence
had on a woman's life, especially between 1910 and 1950. That's all I can really say
without spoiling the rest of the book so if you have not read it then I would
urge you to leave because I don't want to spoil anything and then after this
I'm going to talk a little bit about more in-depth thoughts that I guess
could be considered spoilers. I probably will spoil some things but it's up to
you to decide. But I would say go read this book; I highly recommend it and now
I'm going to talk a little bit about spoilers.

So first I have to talk about
the ending because at first I was extremely like, "what just happened?" It
just ended and it was so outraged. But the more I think about it, especially
that final chapter, where the woman who is supposed to come help her mother gave
birth to Ursula, is stuck at this bar because of the snow- it was just
interesting because it obviously alludes to the sort of fate of the story, that this
woman can never make it there to help save Ursula. And how that forced the other characters to save Ursula or to let her die. Or not let her die but she had to
die; it was fated.

But also sort of looking at the middle class English I
think a kind of stuck in their place and especially reflecting later on the war,
this was prior to the war in the novel, but how they didn't really have
any agency. And then also the ending, the two chapters prior to that one where in
one alternative ending--I think this is how it must be interpreted-- in one ending
Ursula has knowledge of all these lives she's lived, so she knows
exactly what to do in order to go kill Hitler. And so she does that which is
sort of like the heroic thing that everyone would expect someone with this
ability to do. And then in the chapter following that she, I assume, doesn't kill
Hitler because there was a war and Teddy survives.

So I don't know how exactly he survived
if she didn't kill Hitler. It maybe it's her reward in this alternative life to
killing Hitler in the other alternative life. I don't know I just found that
really fascinating and at first I was really let down cuz I just thought it
was a real bummer of an ending. But then the more I sort of dwelt on it and  
thought, you know which life should she choose? Which one did she choose? We don't really know what the real reality was.

It left me thinking a lot and I did admire
that about the book. If you have thoughts on this book, anything spoilery,
please comment below just give people fair warning that you're going to talk about spoilers because I don't want to ruin it for people. And I hope you enjoyed this
video I will see you in my next one. Bye!.