Life After Life
What if she had thrown herself beneath the express train or had died after Belgravia, or, indeed, what if she were simply to open her bedroom window and throw herself out, head first? Would she really be able to come back and start again? Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was—wasn’t everyth
... See moreKate Atkinson • Life After Life
A girl surely should know better than to be caught on those back stairs—or in the shrubbery—like the heroine in a gothic novel, the kind that Bridget was so fond of. But who would have suspected that the reality of it would be so sordid and bloody? He must have sensed something in her, something unchaste, that even she was unaware of. Before lockin
... See moreKate Atkinson • Life After Life
Horrible that the blame turns to herself so immediately for an act of barbarity performed by another.
He had eventually flushed his fugitive sister out from Hôtel d’Alsace in St. Germain, a degenerate endroit, in Hugh’s estimation, the scene of Oscar Wilde’s demise, which said everything you needed to know about the place.
Kate Atkinson • Life After Life
Does this hotel still exist?
Ursula watched as Mr. Winton waded back through the waves, carrying Roland’s limp little body in his arms. Pamela and Ursula had thought the tide was going out but it was coming in, already filling the moat and lapping at the mound of sand which would soon be gone forever. An ownerless hoop bowled past, driven by the breeze. Ursula stared out to se
... See moreKate Atkinson • Life After Life
This paragraph is lovely and encapsulates all the previous lives that Ursula has lived in this book. It is Roland, rather than her, that drowns, as she is building a sand castle rather than being pulled into a swim. The hoop rolling down the beach reappears in multiple versions of her past self. The counterpoint of the moat detail in contrast to the limp body of Roland is powerful. A small detail countered by a major one, and yet those are the things one remarks upon when events like this occur.
Miss Woolf said that she had had a “harrowing” late night “chat” with Herr Zimmerman about the situation in Germany. “Things are terrible over there, you know.” “I know,” Ursula said. “Do you?” Miss Woolf said, her interest piqued. “Do you have friends there?” “No,” Ursula said. “No one. Sometimes one just knows, doesn’t one?”
Kate Atkinson • Life After Life
Ugh.
And what was the alternative to television anyway? (She wasn’t letting the argument die, even though it was with herself.) A jigsaw puzzle? Really? There was reading, of course, but one didn’t always want to come in from a trying day at work, full of messages and memos and agendas, and then tire one’s eyes out with even more words.
Kate Atkinson • Life After Life
“What happened to the baby?” Ursula asked. “What?” “What happened to the baby?” Ursula repeated. “Did they give it to someone nice?”
Kate Atkinson • Life After Life
Was it possible to receive this level of cluelessness throughout an abortion? Would the clinic really have thrust her into the procedure without explicit verification from the patient? Without explaining the procedure? I appreciate how quickly its all over and done with and think back to ankle surgery, how I was wheeled into a room, put under, and awoke in a recovery room hours later, hardly worse for wear.
sometimes Millie burned just a little too brightly.
Kate Atkinson • Life After Life
Ok Eyore.
Ursula found it easier than she had expected to lock this occurrence away. After all, hadn’t Sylvie herself said that the definition of an indiscretion was that you didn’t speak of it afterward?
Kate Atkinson • Life After Life
Innocuous passages become horrifying traumas pages later. Now I understand why the book takes the form that it does. (Slowing down really opens this thing up, doesn't it?)