The Life to Come

January 29, 2018
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 concentration, like a standard-issue dream.”

In this globe- and decade-spanning audiobook, author de Kretser follows a collection of loosely connected characters, most of them Australian immigrants or �migr�s. As the novel travels from Australia to Sri Lanka and France, and back to Australia, narrator Shiromi Arserio capably moves through a wide range of accents. Pippa, a moderately successful, moderately talented author, is the through line, but de Kretser is more interested in the complexities and contradictions of contemporary life and relationships than the story of any single character. The sizable cast can be difficult to track, and Arserio's consistent inflection does not always provide clues. Her wry delivery, however, perfectly captures the cutting observations about contemporary life. E.C. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine