"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.She ought to know.InKate Atkinson'scompelling 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. But then she is born again, and acquires her name. 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. More rebirths, longer lives, more deaths."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. With its second-person narration, Mohsin Hamid's"How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia"reads like a text-based role-playing game. In "Life After Life," Ursula keeps re-spawning after each death, eventually gaining some ability to return to life at a key checkpoint and make a different choice.
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