From the critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller The Confessions of Max Tivoli comes The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, a rapturously romantic story of a woman who finds herself transported to the "other lives" she might have lived.
After the death of her beloved twin brother and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Greta Wells undergoes electroshock therapy. Over the course of the treatment, Greta finds herself repeatedly sent to 1918, 1941, and back to the present. Whisked from the gas-lit streets and horse-drawn carriages of the West Village to a martini-fueled lunch at the Oak Room, in these other worlds, Greta finds her brother alive and wellâ??though fearfully masking his true personality. And her former lover is now her devoted husband...but will he be unfaithful to her in this life as well? Greta Wells is fascinated by her alter egos: in 1941, she is a devoted mother; in 1918, she is a bohemian adulteress.
In this spellbinding novel by Andrew Sean Greer, each reality has its own losses, its own rewards; each extracts a different price. Which life will she choose as she wrestles with the unpredictability of love and the consequences of even her most carefully considered choices?… (más)
Meh. Really didn’t like this much. Was overly boring and in a weird way more about the gay brother, Felix, than the protagonist, Greta. Also, I’m pretty sure only a man could write a woman choosing to stay in 1918 as pregnant, rather than returning to her own time in 1985.
Just meh. No. No more of Greer for me now that I’ve read the two novels of his that I own, and didn’t think much of either. Max Tivoli was definitely not up my alley, and this one really wasn’t either. ( )
Sticking with my original impression. Too much describing as opposed to showing--a good idea but poor execution.
Started this last night. The premise is interesting, but the writing is somewhat clumsy. I'm going to hold out through the evening commute and tonight. ( )
„Was wäre, wenn?“ Eine Frage, die interessante und verrückte Ideen zu Tage bringen kann. Ein unmögliches Leben ist das Szenario einer in der Zeit ‚verrückten‘ Frau: Eine genetisch gleiche, 36jährige Greta Wells gibt es jeweils in den Jahren 1985, 1918, 1941. Drei Existenzen, die hier miteinander verschlungen werden. Was wäre, wenn eine Frau all diese Leben in all diesen Zeiten erleben könnte? Was wäre anders? Was wäre gleich? Und die wichtigste Frage: Wäre es ein besseres Leben?
The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?
I knew that not all lives are equal, that the time we live in affects the person we are, more than I had ever thought. Some have a harder chance. Some get no chance at all. With great sadness, I saw so many people born in the wrong time to be happy.
How often in life do people make that awful sacrifice, that murder of possibilities?
"When you were a little girl, madam," he said, gesturing to her, "was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?"
Her eyes roamed over my face like someone reading a book; I must have been that open and obvious in the hours after my procedure. She picked up the cup and saucer. "There are two kinds of people, I think," she said, and the bird sang through the pause she placed there. The apostrophe between her eyes deepened, then softened. "There are the ones who wake up in the middle of the night and see a woman in a wedding dress sitting by the window, and they think to themselves, 'Oh my God, it's a ghost!' That's the first. Someone who feels something real, and believes it is real. And there are the ones who see the phantom and think, 'I don't know what I've seen, but it's not a ghost because ghosts don't exist.' In my life, I've learned those are the two kinds." She took a sip from her teacup, then simply set it on its saucer, smiling. "And nobody is the second kind."
We had not seen each other for months, and before that very little after Felix's death. It was another sadness in my life, but I think we avoided each other, as criminals avoid the scene of a crime.
the dying have a way of looking at the rest of us in this strange way, as if we were the ones merely mortal.
It seemed so possible that I could be somewhere else, again, that each morning would unfold anew like a pop-up book of possible lives.
"You're a smoker," I said. Nathan squinted at me queerly and stroked my forehead again. "You just rest." As he moved, its lavender smoke wrote in cursive all around his body.
Left alone, I looked around the room with the sensitive eyes of a detective inspecting a murder scene, looking for clues to this world.
Two Felixes, two Ruths, a new Nathan, and now this Leo person. I was someone switching television channels, trying to keep all the characters straight.
Is it better to hear of death or witness it? For I had suffered both and could not tell you.
Isn't this the time traveler's curse? I did not see what was to come, but saw the possibilities. And the pain of seeing life and happiness in people I knew to be dead in other times, it was like that sad sense of the past, when the glass warps how we perceive things.
She found herself saying, "No. Don't fight for me." But who on earth would say no? Who on earth would not long to be fought for? Is this not the very heart of human existence, to be worth fighting for, worth losing everything for?
A MISTAKE, MADE in another world. And here: It could be righted. There was so little time—only six procedures left—and here we all were: with me grasping for Felix, for Alan, before my world killed them again: another bringing Nathan once more into my life, to understand him, to have him in all worlds: and this one: She was trying to pull Leo back through the ether. Each of us: to fix the mistakes we'd made. To say the right words, do the right actions, before the porthole closed.
So tell me, gentlemen, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman?
"Thank you," I said. "Thank you," and I said it the second time as one double-ties a knot, to ensure that it will stay.
Only in brief flashes does it come to us that we may never see someone again. It is an absurd thought; a car crash or heart attack or rare disease may take anyone, and the last may be that matinee you sneaked to together, or the tipsy lunch, or the silly phone argument that one more meeting would dilute; equally, the melodramatic moments in hospitals and airports and apartment doorways are no assurance of an ending.
From the critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller The Confessions of Max Tivoli comes The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, a rapturously romantic story of a woman who finds herself transported to the "other lives" she might have lived.
After the death of her beloved twin brother and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Greta Wells undergoes electroshock therapy. Over the course of the treatment, Greta finds herself repeatedly sent to 1918, 1941, and back to the present. Whisked from the gas-lit streets and horse-drawn carriages of the West Village to a martini-fueled lunch at the Oak Room, in these other worlds, Greta finds her brother alive and wellâ??though fearfully masking his true personality. And her former lover is now her devoted husband...but will he be unfaithful to her in this life as well? Greta Wells is fascinated by her alter egos: in 1941, she is a devoted mother; in 1918, she is a bohemian adulteress.
In this spellbinding novel by Andrew Sean Greer, each reality has its own losses, its own rewards; each extracts a different price. Which life will she choose as she wrestles with the unpredictability of love and the consequences of even her most carefully considered choices?
)
)
Google Books — Cargando...
(3.46)
9
Just meh. No. No more of Greer for me now that I’ve read the two novels of his that I own, and didn’t think much of either. Max Tivoli was definitely not up my alley, and this one really wasn’t either. (