I don’t often engage in conversations about multiverses and theories of that nature because they make my head spin. I come up with so many clarifying questions that I often lose sight of the big picture and get lost in the details. However, when I was reading Life After Life by Kate Atkinson and listening to the conversation in class, I started to question the theory.
So if I’m understanding this right, there is another me somewhere out there living another life. Somewhere in my life, I chose to buy a different jacket or chose a different university. I ran away from home, or I robbed a bank. In any case, it’s worth wondering: is that really me? Or is that just another person’s life entirely? What if I had spilled hot water on myself as a kid because I chose not to heed my mother’s warning and ended up with burn marks all over my body? Then I would look differently, and how people identified me physically would differ. What if I chose to stay in Thailand instead of immigrating to America with my parents? Then I would speak Thai more fluently and English less so. I’ve read that the language people speak in influence the way they think, so I would be different mentally. What if I did something gross in elementary school that deemed me a loser for the duration of my grade school years? Then I would have been a loner with no friends in school unless I switched schools (in yet another universe!). My emotional health would be very different from what it is in this life. In all of these cases, it would not be me. The physical change is not nearly so drastic as the other two, but combine them all together and it’s a completely different person with completely different identifiers. What exactly would still be me about it? My soul? My family? My name? What if in another universe my parents chose not to have children? Would I exist in this universe? Are there multiple universes then where different combinations of people DON’T exist? What if in another universe I chose to change my name? Are there even more universes where we go by different names?
This is what I mean when I say that my head starts to spin. It’s easier to imagine a different life with one change, but much, much more difficult to imagine all of these little changes accumulating to a completely different life.
Life After Life is an interesting and fast read. I appreciate Sylvie’s humorous, if somewhat snarky, responses to the people around her (particularly Bridget). I can understand her character and honestly she reminds me of my dad (both possess super sharp minds, had very little opportunity for formal education, make up for it by reading a lot, can be overwhelming when displaying knowledge). I like some Ursulas well enough and others not so much. The only problem I had with this book was that I couldn’t keep some of the characters straight. In one life, Ralph was a lover; in another, Crighton was the lover, but Ralph’s presence in that life as a non-lover was confusing. Some parts were also very heavy and very hard to read, namely the middle to end of the life where Ursula is married to Derek. Other parts were very informative, such as when Ursula traveled to Germany and stayed with the Brenner family. It was interesting to see how the girls there were patriotic and did not question Hitler’s acts (like overthrowing the democratic party. That would not fly in the United States.) Even though this was a long book, it was a relatively fast read, and it is definitely in my top three books we’ve read in this class. I’m excited to see how Atkinson ends it because the science fiction component of this story doesn’t really “end” (there will always be another life where other choices were made).