What I'm Reading

A God in Ruins, Over and Over

This is What I’m Reading on Letter from Berlin: Every other week I share thoughts on books that I’ve read and loved recently, along with other things I’m reading. These issues are free for all readers. I am grateful, as ever, if you choose to subscribe. Your support is essential.

Our first rental house in Scotland in April was stuffed with books. Every single room, plus some of the hallways, contained bookshelves groaning under their weight. I had brought a couple of books with me to read, but they immediately lost their appeal in the face of so much abundance. Especially when I found Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins one night while putting Bruno to bed. I had already read it twice, once in Sicily while teaching a food writing class, again a few years later. But both A God in Ruins and Life After Life are catnip to me. I see them, I must read them. They never lose their magic, and that magic captivates me again each time anew. How, but how, does she do it?!

I started reading it right away, but we had to leave for our next rental before I could finish, so I took a snapshot of the page I stopped on and reluctantly put it back on the shelf. I finally got back to it last weekend, picking up in the middle where I’d left off two months ago. For a few days I could think of little else and the morning I finished it, I sat in the big cozy chair in the boys’ room where I’d been reading and I wept. And wept. And a few hours later I still couldn’t stop myself from bursting into tears every time I thought about it. I was completely undone. On my third read!

These books were both bestsellers; at this point, I assume that most of you have read them. But what if there are some among you who haven’t yet? So. For those of you new to these two: they are a pair of novels by the author Kate Atkinson and while I have loved several of her books, these two are in my own personal firmament of most beloved books ever. You must start, of course, with Life After Life - a novel about a young woman born in 1910 who keeps dying and being reborn, each time living a little longer before dying again, and as her deaths and lives keep happening, she gets older and takes various different paths in life and you, the reader, are propelled further and further into her life and, simultaneously, forwards (backwards) into history and by the end of the book, if you are anything like me, you will be clutching it in your goose pimpled arms experiencing the kind of full body delight that comes from truly perfect books.

Afterwards, you must let some time go by. You cannot start right away with A God In Ruins, even if you think you should, because it isn’t really a sequel, though you will be thrilled to catch glimpses of the people you came to love from Life After Life. A God In Ruins follows, if that is the word that can be used, the little brother of the main character from Life After Life, who becomes a Halifax pilot in World War II and miraculously survives the war only to endure the postwar years in a tepid marriage, with a problematic daughter and unhappy grandchildren. The book is told in an entirely nonlinear fashion, flashing back and forwards in time, from countless dark nights over the North Sea to a quiet house in an English suburb, even as it inexorably keeps moving forward, like time and life and our minds themselves. AGIR is entirely its own book, its own thing, with an entirely different tone and construction, elegiac where LAL was propulsive, mournful where LAL could be impish. And it has an entirely different goal and focus. If you don’t leave enough time, you will start A God In Ruins expecting more of the showy brilliance of Life After Life and you may find yourself perplexed. But A God in Ruins is the low, slow burn to Life After Life’s pyrotechnics. It must be read on its own terms, with fresh eyes. And when it is over you will be destroyed.

I recently also read Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, which was very funny and dark and fresh, about a sex therapist’s transcriptionist in a small town in upstate New York who falls in love with one of therapist’s patients. I’m not sure I would have picked it up on my own, but it was a gift from my friend Lena, whose husband had recommended it to her, and I was so, so glad for it.

Currently reading: Tessa Hadley’s Late In the Day

Currently borrowing: Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety

Currently awaiting: Dodie Smith’s Look Back with Love