With its second-person narration, Mohsin Hamid's "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" reads like a text-based role-playing game. "Life After Life" is the second literary novel I've read this year that reflects gaming structures, consciously or otherwise, in depicting the joys, vicissitudes and choices of a life. More rebirths, longer lives, more deaths. She drowns in the ocean as a little girl, but is born again on that snowy day in 1910, only to fall to death as a girl trying to rescue a doll her older brother tossed out the window. But then she is born again, and acquires her name. In Kate Atkinson's compelling new novel, "Life After Life," the baby girl who might have been Ursula Todd is born dead on a snowy 1910 day in England, her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. "Time is like a palimpsest," Ursula Todd tells her former psychiatrist, comparing her life to a page that's been scraped, but with traces of the old writing blending with the new.
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