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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Engagements: A Novel” by J. Courtney Sullivan

January 24, 2014

A Diamond is Forever, so the tagline goes, and the real Mary Frances Gerety who wrote it in 1947 provides the inspiration for J. Courtney Sullivan’s recent novel “The Engagements.” Sullivan fictionalizes Gerety’s life story – she was a single, Philadelphia-based copywriter for the advertising giant N.W. Ayer. “A Diamond is Forever” was a throwaway, yet it became a meme that helped drive the establishment of the diamond engagement ring – an act now viewed as a tradition was initially a ploy to increase a market. Sullivan’s novel traces the increase through the life of her copy writer, through the 4 Cs (you probably know what they are) through two months’ salary (to make buying a diamond even more aspirational) up to incarnations like the right-hand ring, intended to appeal to modern women.

Sullivan adds several love stories to the central story, and then uses all of them to illustrate the change in the significance of diamonds over time and social class. There are Evelyn and Gerald Pearsall, an upper-class couple who marry in the 1930s, and then watch helplessly as their only son’s marriage falls apart in the 1970s. James and Sheila are high school sweethearts; she’s a nurse and he drives an ambulance. Their marriage is just as tight, but they struggle constantly with money. PJ, a concert violinist, and Delphine, who sells musical instruments, including a Stradivarius, from a Paris shop she owns with her husband, have a whirlwind romance. We are introduced to it in almost its last stages. And then there is Kate, who objects to marriage on political grounds. Her life partner, Dan, is willing to humor her prejudice, and they have a daughter, Ava. Their story centers on their roles in the 2012 wedding of Kate’s cousin Jeff and his longtime companion, Toby. Ava is the flower girl, and Kate is in charge of the rings, each of which sports a large diamond.

The novel covers more than half a century, and sprawls over the Eastern United States as far west as Ohio, and to London and Paris. Sullivan uses the time and space to explore far beyond her central theme. Evelyn and Gerald struggle in their marriage but it never occurs to them to end it. Family is central, and the family unit, for them, consists of two parents and their children. That their son might separate from his wife, leading her to move the two children across the country nearer her own parents is nearly inconceivable to Gerald and Evelyn. Yet they adapt. As does the institution of marriage itself.

Kate and Dan similarly put their family at the center of their lives. Kate is deeply opposed to the idea of marriage, though from her thoughts and acts it appears that it’s mostly the wedding she objects to. Her life with Dan is a marriage in all but name (and that’s one reason most states turn such relationships into common-law marriages eventually). Kate and Dan have no objection to the marriage of Toby and Jeff, and Sullivan does a nice job with the ironies inherent in Kate’s participation in this elaborate event. The plot here centers on diamonds, too, in this case one set in a ring that is misplaced.

There are other plots, subplots, and themes, and everything comes together in a very satisfying ending. “The Engagements” is a rich and surprisingly gripping novel, one that I would happily take on a long plane ride. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace” by D.T. Max

January 17, 2014

With the exception of (or possibly because of) “Consider the Lobster,” I have been a little intimidated by David Foster Wallace’s reputation as a difficult writer. I haven’t read “Infinite Jest” though it’s on my list, and the thought of reading the posthumous “The Pale King” is both sad and overwhelming. So I’m not sure what impulse made me pick up D.T. Max’s literary biography of Wallace “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.” I’m glad I did: “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story” is exemplary, a loving and clear explanation of Wallace’s life and work.

Wallace grew up in central Illinois, in the university town of Champaign-Urbana. His father was in the philosophy department; his mother taught English at a local community college. The house was full of books, words, and ideas. Wallace became an adept tennis player in high school, spent summers teaching tennis, and followed his father to Amherst College. In college, Wallace made some friends who were to stay his friends throughout his too-short life. He started writing fiction. He had to withdraw twice because of depression. And then he made a sparkling finish, writing two theses, one of which became his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987).

Wallace went on to graduate school in creative writing, and to early professional success and to personal and professional struggles. He published a collection of short stories, wrote non-fiction, and was invited, twice, to Yaddo. He returned to graduate school, this time at Harvard, to study philosophy. He struggled with depression, pot, alcohol, and women. He taught English, first in Boston and then in Illinois. He had difficult romantic relationships. He published Infinite Jest (1996). Eventually his life seemed to settle into some sobriety and calm, with a marriage, dogs, teaching and writing. You probably know the ending.

Throughout it all, Max does an excellent job sorting through letters, conversations, and Wallace’s papers, relating the life to the work and rendering Wallace’s literary influences (particularly Pynchon) clear. Wallace maintained some life-long friendships; in his letters he discussed everything from the future of fiction to recovery from alcohol and drug abuse to the state of his love life and his dogs. “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story” is a loving, well-written story of a life lived in constant struggle, of a man with a hugely engaged and engaging mind (Max calls it recursive). You may be wondering about the title; Max discusses it in a New Yorker blog post here.)

A good non-fiction book should spark a mental conversation between reader and writer, and Max’s book, while no exception, goes one step farther, embodying Max’s conversation as reader with Wallace. There’s a Wallace-like set of endnotes that Max uses to enlarge upon points in the main text. For example, in the Max describes Wallace’s process of preparing for, attending, and writing about the Illinois State Fair for Harper’s. He says that the editing process reminded the editors of a tennis game and describes some unable-to-be-disproven embellishments that Wallace included. Max adds two footnotes, one about additional transgressions that includes a quote from Wallace’s sister that “his nonfiction was fanciful and his fiction was what you had to look out for,” and the other about Wallace’s hints that he knew he was pushing journalism’s limits. There are many similar lovely moments in this engaging and deeply interesting book. Let us know your favorites in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture” by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel

January 10, 2014

The Google Books project, underway since 2004, has scanned or converted approximately 30,000,000 books, making enormous volumes of information available digitally. Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel were among the first to figure out that all that knowledge is searchable. But there were challenges, including the fact that knowledge in books is encoded in strings of words, not, as in a spreadsheet, individual cells. In “Uncharted,” a remarkable and entertaining new book, Aiden and Michel tell the detailed story of how they set about to mine this vast dataset. They developed a new discipline, the practice of quantifying historical change, they have called “culturomics. Along the way they worked out a new search application, the Google N-gram Viewer, which “charts the frequency of words and ideas over time.” (An n-gram is a word or phrase: a single word is a 1-gram, a two word phrase like “New York” is a 2-gram, and so on.)

General readers – even users of Google Books – may be unaware of this clever and fiendishly addictive application. The N-gram Viewer allows the user to search the text of all the books Google has included in its Google Books project (texts are sortable by language – not all of the books are in English). Users can see how often a particular word, or set of words, appears in the corpus (the y-axis is the frequency). Think Brooklyn is hot now? Unfortunately I can’t load the illustration, but if you experiment with the N-gram viewer you can see how much more often the word was used between 1900 and 1940.

Aiden and Michel started out by studying how words change over time – specifically, how irregular verbs become regularized, and why some do not. (One example – why do we still say drove and not drived?) Word frequencies, they learned, follow a power distribution, much like the Richter scale (there are big earthquakes, but not many of them). We use a lot of rare words, though we may not use any one of them very often. The authors say:

In Ulysses, only ten words are used more than 2,653 times. But there are a hundred words used more than 265 times, and a thousand words used more than 26 times, and so on . . .”

This insight turned into research that led to a fascinating article in Nature. How the young computer scientists persuaded Google to let them into the database of books and start exploring the data makes up a good portion of the book. The rest reports some of the authors’ explorations of the development of language, what the authors call the half-life of fame (it’s decreasing), the clear effects of censorship visible in the literature, and a culture’s collective memory. It can take a long time to learn about an invention, and often not quite as long to forget it. Take the almost obsolete fax machine. It pops up as a 2-gram in the 1980s and usage rises steeply for perhaps two decades. You’d think the fax machine was a new invention. In fact, it was invented in the 1840s (yes, you read that right). As the authors conclude: “Big news travels fast–but big ideas don’t.”

“Uncharted” is a fascinating and eminently readable peek at new ways of thinking. You can read the authors’ more rigorous but equally accessible original report in Nature here, but read the book for the color and expansion of the authors’ insights and wonderful retelling of how they got there. What’s the most fascinating N-gram you’ve come up with? Share your finds in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

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Arts and Entertainment

Heather Quinlan’s NY Accent Film “If These Knishes Could Talk ” Covered On FOX 5

December 20, 2013

FOX 5 10:00 News spent time in the Heights last night interviewing BHB’s Heather Quinlan about her New York accent documentary, If These Knishes Could Talk. They also did a little man-on-the street action—see if you can spot the locals.

“Knishes” is also available on Amazon.com.

New York News


Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/64567

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City” by Robin Nagle

December 20, 2013

As a long-time resident of New York City I knew two things about New York City’s Sanitation Department: its workers call themselves “New York’s Strongest,” and the department, like the Police and Fire Departments, is run on quasi-military lines. I learned a lot more reading Robin Nagle’s fascinating anthropological study of the Sanitation Department “Picking Up.”

Nagle reports that New York City employs approximately 10,000 San workers at any one time; approximately 80% of them are uniformed. DSNY has three major responsibilities – picking up the garbage, including bagged trash (11,000 tons a day) and recycling (2,000 tons a day) from residences and street wastebaskets, figuring out how to dispose of it, and clearing snow from the streets. DSNY also sweeps litter from the streets – 6,000 miles of them. So it’s not a small portfolio. Nagle points out that because we don’t like to think about our trash, we often look through the workers.

But San men, and women, do much more than pick up the trash and haul it away. Planning routes is a complex logistical task, one that varies as weather and population, change. San workers have to hold a Class B commercial driver’s license – according to Nagle, those garbage trucks weigh more than 26,000 pounds. They have to understand the mechanical systems of the trucks or brooms they drive, and how to maneuver them in narrow streets. Nagle covers all those tasks, as well as the history and development of the department, in engaging prose.

And that’s before she gets to snow removal. When a storm approaches, crew members work many shifts clearing the roads before they get back to picking up the trash and recycling. Here’s how Nagle describes one plowing experience:

During a brief, sloppy December storm that sent the Department into battle mode, I was assigned to a team sent to tandem plow a section of the Bronx River Parkway. We climbed an entrance to the northbound side and spread out . . . Slush on the road ahead of us was thick. The first plow sent a rooster tail of it into the path of the second plow; the second plow’s tail was a little bigger. The third plow created a curl taller than the truck, which I [in the fourth truck] turned into a still bigger, more extravagant wave before the last plow sent it vaulting over the right lane guardrail. We were a mighty force . . .

Nagle also touches on what happens when a storm gets ahead of New York City, as happened in 1888, 1969 and, as many readers may remember, 2010. Nagle’s chapters dissecting the Department’s response to those storms are particularly careful and intelligible.

Nagle took the civil service exam to become a San worker; she trained to become one, and she spent time on the streets and in the garages as a worker. “Picking Up” describes the real thing, from the earliest training to the benevolent societies and choices to take promotional exams (or not). Nagle has brought to life an interesting, vibrant, and important subculture in New York City, one we regularly choose to overlook. Read this accessible and well-written book and you will understand your world a little better.

What’s the best decoration you ever saw on the front of a truck? (Yes, Nagle touches on mungo, pieces taken from the trash, and includes it in her extensive and useful glossary.) Let us know in the comments.

See you in January! I hope your holidays are filled with good books.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Master Switch” by Tim Wu

December 13, 2013

Information wants to be free. The Internet is different. Net neutrality. Or, as Tim Wu puts it in his surprisingly compelling economic history “The Master Switch,” “it has become a commonplace of the early twenty-first century that, in matters of culture and communications, ours is a time without precedent.” In fact, according to Wu, the Internet is only the latest in a series of information technology shifts that changed the means and speed of transmission.

Wu shows that over the last century and a half (and probably longer, but Wu goes far enough back to make the point) information technologies have shifted between open, like the Internet is now, and closed – think movies or TV.

History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled . . . History also show that whatever has been closed too long is ripe for ingenuity’s assault . . . This oscillation of information industries between open and closed is so typical a phenomenon that I have given it a name: “the Cycle.”

Wu traces the communications industries of the 20th century through the cycle – movies, radio, television, telegraph and of course the telephone. Younger readers will not remember the shock of the AT&T breakup after a lengthy antitrust lawsuit but might, perhaps, recall the disaster that was the AOL-Time Warner merger. Wu describes both in detail, and well, particularly the latter. The failure lay in the idea behind the merger – that AOL’s customers would pay for Time Warner content, and that Time Warner customers would become AOL users. “The only problem with this idea was the Internet.” By the time of the merger, regular users did not need AOL to reach the Internet. “Once online, a user could go wherever he wished, the Internet being set up to connect any two parties, whoever they might be.”

Wu’s case for the existence of the cycle is convincing, and in the final chapter of his book he proposes an answer to the questions he raises – to what extent should the US Government interrupt or slow down the Internet’s experience of the Cycle? His answer is “somewhat.” Information industries have long been regulated in this country (that’s what the FCC, for example, does). He suggests what he calls a Separations Principle, “the creation of a salutary distance between each of the major functions or layers in the information economy. It would mean that those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the tools . . . or access be kept apart from one another.” The government also needs to keep its distance, except for some enforcement activities.

Will it work? What’s your response to Mr. Wu’s argument? His prescription? Please let us know what you think in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Heart Broke In” by James Meek

December 6, 2013

Two organisms living together. Sometimes, when each organism gets something from the other, we call it symbiosis. Other times, one feeds or uses the other while giving nothing in return. Then we call it parasitism. Sometimes what we think are parasites can carry protective benefits as well. There are theories, for example, that our digestive systems developed in symbiosis with what we are now calling “good” bacteria. The complexities involved when two organisms cohabit make it a good metaphor for human life. We marry, for example, but when we love, we are vulnerable.

James Meek’s sprawling and moving new novel “The Heart Broke In,” set in London, is full of dyads connected by bonds of love, friendship, family, and, yes, hate. Ritchie, a rock star, is married to Karin, but dallying with an underage girl. Ritchie’s sister Bec, a biologist, appears to be married to her work: researching whether a particular parasite, which can cause blindness, also confers some immunity to malaria. She is engaged to Val Oatman, editor of a tabloid paper, until she realizes that she doesn’t love him. His love changes to hate after she breaks things off. It’s Val’s complex revenge – he threatens to reveal secrets – that drives the story.

The bonds Meek describes are not just those of family, but of friendship and country. Ritchie’s and Bec’s father was a soldier, killed in Northern Ireland many years before the start of the novel. Their mother has gone to live in Spain, though she travels back to see her children and grandchildren. When Ritchie decides to make a film showing his meeting and putative forgiving of the murderer – or is he a freedom fighter? – now released from prison, he seeks permission from his mother and sister. The new relationship between Ritchie and his father’s killer is as interesting as all the others, and adds a new dimension to the story.

There’s also a delightful naïf, Alex, Ritchie’s old friend and former band mate who has become a biologist. Alex’s long bouts of concentration are described vividly in terms the reader can connect with: he can visualize cells and the proteins folded within them (though he usually expresses himself with an advertising jingle). Alex becomes obsessed with fathering a child, allowing Meek to explore both the biology and the sexuality (or not, in the case of IVF) of human reproduction. Alex is more successful as a biologist. When celebrity accidentally comes his way he tumbles into it, then stumbles out again.

Celebrity, betrayal, vengeance, Northern Ireland, biology, African poverty, American prosperity and general ignorance, and rock and roll. Meek uses his broad canvas in this entertaining and lively book to make some interesting observations about human nature. What’s your favorite story of a good act by a bad person? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” A Novel by Robin Sloan

November 22, 2013

Image via Amazon.com

It’s been a while since I read a good quest story. When information is available instantly in the comfort of one’s home, there’s less reason to travel to find it. Clay Jannon, the protagonist of Robin Sloan’s charming new novel “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,” mostly searches by computer. In this book, the travel is by plane and automobile. The magic comes from the imagination.

Recently unemployed after the startup he worked for failed, Clay stumbles into a job as the night clerk at Mr. Penumbra’s bookstore. Yes, it is open 24 hours a day. Once Clay is left alone to explore the bookstore, he finds that it is not quite what it appeared at first. There are shelves of books for sale, but then there are other shelves – Mr. Penumbra also operates a private lending library, one that is organized in an esoteric way. In addition to fetching books down from the shelves, Clay’s responsibilities include keeping a log of the members, the books they take out, and their appearance.

The job leaves Clay with quite a bit of time on his hands, so he disobeys instructions and starts poking about in the stacks. He programs a 3-D model of the bookstore, and uses Google’s new hyper-local shopping service to advertise the store. That ad brings in Kat Potente, a Googler – which means she is a very smart programmer. She smart enough, in fact, to fix a line of code in Clay’s model, and become intrigued with the bookstore herself. Together, they identify what all the borrowers have been seeking. That in turn sends Mr. Penumbra off to New York on shadowy business, and Clay and Kat follow.

As Clay likes to point out, it’s the perfect team for a quest. There’s the old wizard (Penumbra), the young one, Kat, and the rogue – that’s Clay himself. For a warrior, Clay draws on his best friend since sixth grade Neel Shah, now a budding entrepreneur. Together the four of them use brain power and computing power to track down the mystery. They don’t face down dragons, but there are some pretty powerful and shadowy forces they come to grips with. Mr. Sloan resolves it all nicely, with a few geeky, and many more literary, touches.

It’s very much to Mr. Sloan’s credit that he makes the computer programming and the archival activities of his characters transparent and comprehensible. “Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” is a lively and complex book, full of allusions both classical and modern. Perhaps it also shows that, parental concern notwithstanding, a youth spent playing video games might in fact be good preparation for something. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Junkyard Planet” by Adam Minter

November 15, 2013

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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. This mantra has been around since at least the first Earth Day back in 1970. Like you, perhaps, and most other Americans, I find it hard to reduce. I have learned to take bags with me to the grocery store. We had cloth diapers (and a diaper service) for our first child but we threw our hands up and went with disposables when the second came along. I wash out ziploc bags and reuse them. Food scrap collection isn’t required but I do that, most of the time anyway. But that’s about the extent of what I can reuse. So I recycle, and that makes me feel I’m doing my bit. Also, it’s required, though now I don’t have to sort so much of it. (You can watch a machine sorting recyclables here. Minter’s description of the science behind the technology is fascinating.)

But what happens to those mountains of newspapers, cans, bottles, jars and junk mail? That’s where Adam Minter picks up in his lively and entertaining new book “Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade.” As it turns out, there’s gold in those hills, sometimes quite literally. Minter points out that what I call recycling is really “harvesting” – that is, collecting materials to turn them into something else. Moreover, harvesting is one of the hardest parts of the process. Because Americans like to toss stuff. Or, rather, we have no economic reason not to toss it. That’s not true other places. Minter says:

There are few moral certainties here, but there is a guarantee: if what you toss into your recycling bin can be used in some way, the international scrap recycling business will manage to deliver it to the person or company who can do so most profitably.

(Not everything can be reused. Minter says some “goods–such as smartphones–are only partially recyclable, and some–like paper–can only be recycled a finite number of times. So yes, recycling delays the trashing of your castoffs. But they don’t live forever.”)

Despite the ubiquity of office paper recycling programs and returnable bottle laws, it turns out that what we recycle most of, if you’re measuring by weight, it’s cars. Nearly 12 million of them last year, and most of that is metal. Nowadays, cars can be almost completely recycled. In fact, the scrap metal in America’s old cars is so valuable now, and technology has improved enough, that old piles of junked cars that once littered the landscape have been salvaged and recycled. Some landfills have been “mined” for the cars that were once placed in them. (You can see an auto shredder in action here.)

Where does it all go? According to Minter, most of the scrap from the US goes to China, with India the next largest importer. Their interest is driven by two factors: demand and shipping prices. Both countries have growing industrial sectors that need large amounts of raw material – which is what scrap metal has become once it leaves the recycling plant. Shipping costs are also key. China makes a lot of products that are exported to the US (iPhones and iPads to name just two). But since the US doesn’t export as much to China it doesn’t cost much for Chinese scrap dealers to use shipping containers that might otherwise be empty to send scrap back.

One way or another, the boat is going back to China, and the fuel to send it there is going to be burned . . . So anybody — or anything — hopping on that boat is getting what amounts to a carbon-neutral boat ride to China . . . [T]he critical fact for American scrap companies competing against Chinese companies is that the price of shipping to China is typically cheaper than shipping between geographically distant U.S. cities.

Scrap, it turns out, is picturesque, the technologies are modern, and Minter’s lively writing conveys his fascination with the industry. The gold I mentioned above? Some people, in some places not in the U.S., are willing to take apart cell phones apart to extract it even if local safety and environmental regulations are not up to our standards. “Junkyard Planet” is a book for anyone interested in the environment, the economics of recycling, or a thoughtful look at the consumption we take for granted.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson

November 8, 2013

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You are born, you live your life, you die. The universe appears to be ordered. As Albert Einstein once said, “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” For Ursula Todd, the central character of Kate Atkinson’s absorbing “Life After Life,” things operate a little differently. Ursula, the daughter of the warm but distant Hugh, a banker, and his sardonic wife, Sylvie, dies at birth. At least she does in one version of her story. But in the next and the next and the next she doesn’t, living a little longer each time. Atkinson uses her novel to explore the elements of chance in each life, the consequences each inconsequential choice, or the weather, or the haphazard explosion of a bomb might have on the lives of those around us.

Ursula is born in 1910. Her father is young enough to fight in the Great War; her younger brothers are old enough to fight in the Second World War. In most of her lives Ursula stays unmarried, though she has several lovers. In one life she is raped and undergoes an illegal abortion. She marries in two of her lives, once to an abuser, once to a German – and she adopts German citizenship. In several of her lives, Ursula studies in Germany in the 1930s, befriending a younger German woman named Eva Braun. That relationship gets her close enough to Hitler to point a gun at him in 1930.

Atkinson provides enough structure and chapter headings to allow the reader to make sense of things. That’s harder for Ursula, for whom time moves in a circle, because she is aware of other possible outcomes. She feels a fear, a darkening, a memory. Sometimes she is Cassandra-like, and her mother in particular is wary of her. Is it any wonder that Ursula tends to the detached, especially in her relationships with men? Her closest relationships are with family members. Ursula’s aunt, Isobel, provides an example of liberated behavior combined with deep consideration (it is Isobel who arranges the abortion). Ursula’s older sister, Pamela, settles into a conventional life of marriage and children despite an acute intelligence. And Ursula’s younger brother, Teddy, is the light of her, and several others’, lives.

The book is not confusing, and Atkinson enriches each version of Ursula’s life with added detail. The reader is in essence in the same position as Ursula: we know that in one, or several, versions, that Teddy will not survive the Second World War. Yet in each version we uncover things we did not know. Did Isobel run away with a lover? Give birth to a son? Give him up for adoption? Let Sylvie raise him? In a remarkable achievement, Ursula’s uncertainty, as well as her knowledge, become the reader’s. “Life After Life” may not be for every reader, but if you enjoy ambiguity then read this book. (It would be good for a cross-country plane ride.) You’ll be thinking about it for a long time afterwards.

What do you think happened in that cafe in 1930? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

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