In between, she also uses her half-memory of earlier lives to avert the neighbour girl Nancy being raped and murdered by a child molester. In later lives she averts all this by being preemptively aggressive to the would-be rapist.
Then there is an unhappy life where she is traumatized by being raped, getting pregnant and undergoing an illegal abortion, and finally becoming trapped in a highly oppressive marriage, and being killed by her abusive husband when trying to escape. Then there are several sequences when she falls victim to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 - which repeats itself again and again, though she already has a foreknowledge of it, and only her fourth attempt to avert catching the flu succeeds. In later iterations of her life she dies as a child - drowning in the sea, or when saved from that, by falling to her death from the roof when trying to retrieve a fallen doll.
In the first version, she is strangled by her umbilical cord and stillborn. The novel has an unusual structure, repeatedly looping back in time to describe alternative possible lives for its central character, Ursula Todd, who is born on 11 February 1910 to an upper-middle-class family near Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire.
0 kommentar(er)
