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Summary
Summary
Set in Australia, France, and Sri Lanka, The Life to Come is about the stories we tell and don't tell ourselves as individuals, as societies, and as nations. Driven by a vivid cast of characters, it explores necessary emigration, the art of fiction, and ethnic and class conflict. As Hilary Mantel has written, "I so admire Michelle de Kretser's formidable technique--her characters feel alive, and she can create a sweeping narrative that encompasses years and yet still retain the sharp, almost hallucinatory detail."
Pippa is an Australian writer who longs for the success of her novelist teacher and eventually comes to fear that she "missed everything important." In Paris, Celeste tries to convince herself that her feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka, but blots out the memory of a tragedy from that time and can't commit to his trusting girlfriend, Cassie. Sri Lankan Christabel, who is generously offered a passage to Sydney by Bunty, anold acquaintance, endures her dull job and envisions a brighter future that "rose, glittered, and sank back," while she neglects the love close at hand.
The stand-alone yet connected worlds of The Life to Come offer meditations on intimacy, loneliness, and our flawed perception of reality. Enormously moving, gorgeously observant of physical detail, and often very funny, this new novel by Michelle de Kretser reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can transform and distort the present. It is teeming with life and earned wisdom--exhilaratingly contemporary, with the feel of a classic.
Author Notes
Michelle de Kretser is an editor who lives in Melbourne, Australia. This is her first novel.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
De Kretser's sprawling follow-up to her novella Springtime features many different lives converging and diverging across decades and continents. In Sydney, Pippa wants to make her mark on Australian fiction, while her former professor, George, distances himself from his cult following the success of his own books. A few streets away, Cassie falls for Ash, mesmerized by his mysterious boyhood in Sri Lanka. In Paris, Celeste works as a translator while reckoning with her complicated history with the city and the lover she rearranges her life for. And all the while, over many decades, Sri Lankan Christabel and her childhood friend Bunty build a quiet life together in Australia after reconnecting as adults. While each section can stand alone, together they create a joyful and mournful meditation on the endless small pleasures and complications of life: the difficulties of immigration, the logistics of infidelity, the creativity and insight born of jealousy and spite. In de Kretser's sure-footed and often surprising prose, life is rendered as something that's "tedious yet require[s] concentration, like a standard-issue dream." (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Moving between Sydney, Paris, and Sri Lanka, de Kretser's latest is a collection of linked stories exploring the ways we live and the stories, real and invented, that surround us. The novel is centered around Pippa, a mid-level author who is both in denial and secretly aware that she will never be more than mediocre. Ash is a Sri Lankan living in Sydney, who works hard to pretend a childhood tragedy never occurred but can't manage to trust his devoted girlfriend. In Paris, translator Celeste tries to convince herself that her lover reciprocates her feelings. And Christobel, a lonely Sri Lankan living in Sydney, fails to see that love that is just around the corner. De Kretser, author of the Miles Franklin Award-winning Questions of Travel (2012), has again written a perceptive and articulate novel that blends acute observation and well-chosen details to create a sweeping story that is painfully close to home. With fascinating characters and beautifully nuanced writing, The Life to Come is a powerful exploration of the human condition and a compelling examination of how we look at each other and ourselves.--Gladstein, Carol Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE AUSTRALIAN NOVELIST MICHELLE DE KRETSER has made a habit of disputing the notion that travel necessarily broadens the mind. Her third novel, "Questions of Travel," which won Australia's most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin, contrasted the journeys of an asylum-seeker from the subcontinent with those of a backpacking travel-guide writer from Sydney. The characters in "The Life to Come," de Kretser's fifth novel, are similarly peripatetic. While they all eventually enjoy a comfortable life in suburban Sydney, some are dogged by memories of past lives in violent places. The memory of a stretch of wall split by the sun transports an elderly woman back to her childhood in Sri Lanka: "Pictures like that were always there, running invisibly under her Australian life, appearing now and again like snatches of an old videotape that a later recording has overlaid without entirely erasing." The emigré is one kind of traveler, portrayed here with sympathy and lyricism. But de Kretser, who was born in Sri Lanka and came to Australia at 14, saves her startling satirical firepower for another - the expats of the global West, or those who can travel on a whim. In a novel that restlessly spans decades and continents, a woman named Pippa is as close as de Kretser gets to a protagonist. It is Pippa's friends, colleagues and acquaintances whose stories we learn via impressionistic flashbacks. In the late 1990s, when we meet her, she is an idealistic undergraduate in Sydney who announces "I love India" after watching a documentary on TV. Over time, she becomes a more interesting character, a fullfledged writer who seeks experiences in the world with which to animate her fiction. Yet Pippa remains naive. She preaches empathy for refugees on Facebook, but is careless of the inner lives of others. In 2010, Pippa goes to Paris on a writing fellowship. (The ensuing novel, "French Lessons," is a flop.) Her approach to other cultures is uncomplicated. Europe, she thinks, is "momentous and world-historical"; Australia, "eventless." Plus, there's all that foreign food, which can be recreated at Instagram-worthy dinner parties back home. Many scenes revolve around Pippa in the kitchen, whipping up something ostentatiously multicultural: a lamb tagine with saffron, carrots and fennel for a sick neighbor; a salad of pork and ginger during a Thai phase; local prawns for her literary agent served with lemon juice, brown bread and butter. Meals like these are as familiar in Brooklyn or Portland as they are in inner-city Sydney. Call it the cult of Ottolenghi - that trendy IsraeliBritish chef is name-checked on more than one occasion. In one scene, the function of food as a status symbol for globe-trotting cosmopolites becomes clear. During her time in Paris, Pippa befriends Céleste, an older woman who lives alone. Celeste's father died in the aftermath of the massacre of Algerians in the French capital in 1961; her mother remarried an Australian man she met on the Metro. The family emigrated to Western Australia, but in adulthood Celeste found her way back to Paris as a translator. (This is the kind of fractured life, filled with loss and hard-won visa stamps, that de Kretser protects from ridicule.) Relatives visiting from Perth come over to Celeste's small apartment for lunch, and she prepares gratin dauphinois, chicken in a wine sauce and asparagus from the market. The Australians, flush with money from the mining boom of the new millennium, push the meal around on their plates and talk of how they eat at home: quinoa and broad bean salad, barley with pomegranate seeds. "Why do Australians go on so much about food?" Celeste asks her mother afterward on Skype. Her mother's reply is brutal. "Because they live in a country of no importance." Fora novel concerned with dislocation, there's a lot of grounding humor in "The Life to Come." Most of it comes at the expense of Pippa and her ilk, but de Kretser's observations are so spot on, you'll forgive her even as you cringe. Foreign food makes for Instagram-worthy dinner parties back home. AMELIA LESTER, a writer based in Japan, is working on a collection of essays.
Kirkus Review
An aspiring novelist moves through a circle of friends, lovers, and acquaintances, all navigating fraught relationships with each other and with their homelands.There is a moment in de Kretser's (Springtime, 2016, etc.) novel when she describes the works a character translates as "obscure European...novels that offered no clear message nor any flashing signs as to how they were to be understood, novels whose authors were neither photogenic nor youngsometimes they were even Swiss." This tongue-in-cheek assessmentone of so many delightfully caustic observations throughoutcould be applied to this novel, too. The book is divided into largely stand-alone sections, each of which focuses on a different pair of characters. There is the aforementioned translator, Australian native Cleste, and her married female lover in Paris; budding academic Cassie and her partner, Ash, a Sri Lankan/Scottish scholar in Sydney; Sri Lankan-born Christabel and her girlhood friend, Bunty, who brings her to Australia. Budding writer Pippa is the thread holding all these sections together, making prominent appearances or Hitchcock-ian cameos in the others' lives. These characters give de Kretser, herself a native of Sri Lanka who lives in Sydney, a chance to explore the complexity of societies in the long throes of mistreatment of their ethnic minorities, whether those are Aboriginal people, Indians, Sri Lankans in Australia, or Algerians in Paris. The book's white characters fancy themselves progressive but move through the world with cringing naivet: Pippa includes a statement in her automatic email signature that reads, in part, "I pay my respects to Elders, past, present and future. Sent from my iPad." But if all these sound like dense, heavy ideas (and they are), there is also much pleasure to be found in de Kretser's lovely prose, whose every sentence fiercely shines.A thought-provoking novel of both beauty and brains. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Set mostly in Australia but also Sri Lanka and Paris, this latest from the award-winning de Kretser (Springtime) consists of loosely related chapters, some having stories within stories. The connecting link is Pippa, a young Australian student who is determined to become a novelist. Forthright and clueless with her friends, she ultimately achieves some literary success. Early on, she rooms platonically with a former writing instructor, then later marries a failed classical musician who's never really separated from his quirky, upper-middle-class family. Another chapter follows Cassie, a friend of a friend, who has a serious relationship with a highly educated Sri Lankan. In Paris, Pippa meets Celeste, an Aussie expat involved in a lesbian relationship with Sabine, a Parisian housewife and florist, who obviously isn't as committed as Celeste. A final chapter about two women, neighbors of Pippa's for a time, is a heartrending story of aging and intimacy. VERDICT This marvelous stylistic work, dense with lush descriptions of scents, Asian food, Australian trees and flowers, weather, and Sydney neighborhoods, reflects on issues of race, immigration, and what it means to be an Australian: so different from America-or is it? Highly recommended.-Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
THE HOUSE BY THE RIVER belonged to an old man whose relationship to George Meshaw was complicated but easily covered by 'cousin'. He had lived there alone, with a painting that was probably a Bonnard. Now he was in a nursing home, following a stroke, and George's mother had taken charge of the painting. It was her idea that George should live in the house until it was clear whether or not their cousin was coming home. She had flown up to Sydney for the day, and George met her for a late lunch. George's mother wore a dark Melbourne dress and asked the waiter for 'Really cold water', between remarking on the humidity and the jacarandas--you would never guess that she had lived in Sydney for the first thirty-one years of her life. She bent her head over her handbag, and George found himself looking at a scene from childhood. His mother was on the phone, with the orange wall in the living room behind her. As he watched her, she bent forward from the waist, still holding the receiver. Her hair stood out around her head: George saw a dark-centred golden flower. He couldn't have been more than six but he understood that his mother was trying to block out the noise around her--he folded like that, too, protecting a book or a toy when 'Dinner!' was called--and that this was difficult because the room was full of the loud jazz his father liked to play. Over the years, George's mother's hair had been various colours and lengths, and now it was a soft yellow sunburst again, still with that central dark star. She produced a supermarket receipt from her bag and read from the back of it: 'Hair Apparent. Do or Dye.' 'The Head Gardener,' replied George. 'Moody Hair.' They were in the habit of noting down the names of hair-dressing salons for each other. His mother said, 'Also, I saw this in an airport shop: "Stainless steel is immune to rust, discoloration and corrosion. This makes it ideal for men's jewellery."' George and his mother had the same high laugh-- hee hee hee --and otherwise didn't resemble each other at all. The Bonnard was beside her, done up in cardboard and propped on a chair. When George asked what it was like, his mother said, 'A naked woman and wallpaper. He needed an excuse to paint light.' The house by the river was spacious and built of bricks covered in white render. It was late spring when George moved in, but the rooms on the ground floor were cold and dark. There were mortuary-white tiles on the floor, and the lights were fluorescent tubes that looked as if they would be fatal to insects. They had to be switched on even in the middle of the day. George remembered that his mother had described the house as 'Mediterranean'. Ridiculous second-hand visions--a turreted pink villa with terraced gardens, a bowl of red fish at a window--had opened at once in his mind. He had been back in Sydney for four years and still swam gratefully in its impersonal ease. In Melbourne, where George had lived since he was six, he had wanted to write about modernism in Australian fiction for his PhD. After some difficulty, a professor who would admit to having once read an Australian novel was found. At their first meeting, she handed George a reading list made up of French and German philosophers. When George settled down to read these texts, he discovered some- thing astonishing: the meaning of each word was clear and the meaning of sentences baffled. Insignificant yet crucial words like 'however' and 'which'--words whose meaning was surely beyond dispute--had been deployed in ways that made no sense. It was as unnerving as if George had seen a sunset in his east-facing window, and for a while it was as mesmeric as any disturbance to the order of things. When despair threatened, he transferred his scholarship to a university in Sydney. There, George read novels and books about novels and was wildly happy. He taught a couple of tutorials to supplement his scholarship. Recently, with his thesis more or less out of the way, he had begun to write a novel at night. A loggia with archways ran along the upper floor on the river side of the house. That was where George ate his meals and sometimes came to sit very early, as the park detached itself from the night. Koels called, and currawongs--the birds who had whistled over his childhood. Fifteen minutes by train from the centre of the city, he lived among trees, birdsong, Greeks. The Greeks, arriving forty years earlier, had seen paradise: cheap real estate, sunlight for their stunted children. Fresh from civil war and starvation, they were too ignorant to grasp what every Australian knew: this was the wrong side of Sydney. Where was the beach? There were mornings when George left the house at sunrise, crossed the river and turned into a road that ran beside the quarried-out side of a hill. The sandstone was sheer and largely obscured by greenery: giant gum trees fanned against the rock, and native figs, vines, scrub. Brick bungalows cowered at the base of the cliff and skulked on the ridge above--it seemed an affront for which they would all be punished. In the moist, grey summer dawns, George felt that he was walking into a book he had read long ago. The grainy light was a presage. Something was coming--rain, for certain, and a catastrophe. Opposite the quarry, on the river side of the street, driveways ran down to secretive yards. They belonged to houses that faced the river, with lawns sloping down to the water. A sign warned that the path here was known to flood. But bulky sand- stone foundations and verandas strewn with wicker furniture soothed--these houses were merely domestic, nothing like the foreboding on which they turned their backs. After Pippa moved in, George often came home from his walk to the smell of coffee. They would drink it and eat Vegemite toast on the loggia, and then George would go to bed. Pippa, too, kept irregular hours. Saving to go overseas, she was juggling waitressing with part-time work in a sports store, and George could never be sure of finding her at home. That was fine; the idea was that they would live independently--at least so it had been settled in George's mind. In her second year at university, Pippa had been in his tutorial on 'The Fictive Self': a Pass student whose effortful work George had pitied enough to bump up to a Credit at the last moment. Not long ago, he had run into her near the Reserve Desk at the library. Her hair lay in flat, uneven pieces as if something had been chewing it. As the year drew to a close, a lot of students looked like that: stripey and savage. She had only one essay left to write, 'in my whole life, ever,' said Pippa. A peculiar thing happened: she held out a piece of paper, and George feared he would see a note that began, Help! I am being held prisoner . . . It was an invitation to a party. Pippa shared a house in Coogee with a tall, ravishing girl called Katrina. When George arrived, Katrina was standing by the drinks table on the side veranda, talking about her cervix. Excerpted from The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
