Successive lives Ursula Todd: a novel dazzling brilliance

Ursula in February 1910. Todd is born during a terrible snowstorm that blocks all traffic in the small English country corner where his parents live. Strangled by her umbilical cord, it does not survive.

February 1910. The doctor managed to achieve ownership of Fox Corner and save the child. Ursula grows between an affable banker father, a highly educated but somewhat acerbic mother, an older brother restless and brutal, a big sister with a strong character and intelligence developed a gruff stove and an Irish maid.

June 1914. Ursula drowns during holiday at sea.

June 1914. An amateur painter Ursula fishes out just in time.

January 1915. Ursula climbs onto the roof of his house to retrieve the knitting that his brother has launched the window, and made a fatal fall.

January 1915. When climbing on the stool, Ursula hesitate. His sister enters the room at that time and fished out the knitting using a hockey stick.

The maid of November 1918. Todd went to London for the celebrations of the armistice. She contracted the Spanish flu and contaminates Ursula, who succumbed the next day.

November 1918. Seized by an inexplicable feeling, Ursula tries to avoid the servant on his return from London, but only delays their meeting.

November 1918. For some reason, Ursula wants so prevent the maid to go to London it pushes down the stairs ...

And so on. A life after another, the darkness come take Ursula; but a life after another, his premonitions (it describes as déjà vu) allow him to avoid the death ... until the next intersection. Sometimes she is a victim of her own choices, and sometimes it is the simple chance or of another decision which precipitated its end. In most of its existence, it follows more or less the same way: administrative work in a ministry, no husband or children, some long-term lovers, a volunteer rescuer activity during the Blitz. But sometimes it deviates quite spectacularly. Once, a suffered rape at the age of sixteen derailed the whole course of his short life; another time, she married a German and is stuck in Berlin lorsqu'éclate WWII ...

To say that I was fascinated by this novel by Kate Atkinson would still be below the truth. Far from a "Groundhog Day" literary, repetitive and boring, "Life after life" is a novel of extreme wealth, which depicts both the sweetness of life in the English countryside that the daily horror of the bombing. It offers readers a family saga with extremely well drawn characters, dazzled by the intelligence of its narrative structure and gives him dizzy with all the issues it raises. With a dazzling brilliance, it shows that events beyond our will exert as much influence as our own choices, but the ones like the others determine the course of our life so unpredictable that even with foreknowledge of Ursula, no one can ever be certain how things will turn out.

I have only one regret: that all efforts heroin to "get it right this time" seem to converge towards the biggest cliché of travel literature in time (which is by no means the theme of the novel). But as it occupies only a few pages on over 600 account that "Life after life", it is quite easy to bypass, and close the book turned upside regretting that it will not act in a series to which the subject would be highly suitable.

"Life after life" is not yet translated into French, but Kate Atkinson is an experienced writer and this book has won the Costa Prize in 2013, surely it should be fast.