First of all: I’m finally reading again. I read voraciously throughout my childhood, adolescence, and first years of adulthood, but then it just stopped for some reason. I recently decided to become serious about trying to make money off writing, which means reading a lot to get into the mindset again. One of the first books I picked up was Ken Grimwood’s Replay.
Damn, was it a good choice.
There are very few books that I just cannot put down. There are even fewer that I wish would go on forever. I think this is the first one that I can actually imagine going on forever without ever going bad.
First of all, I loved the way the replays didn’t start blinking by (no “December 14th 1978 of his fifty-sixth replay, Jeff noticed…”) but we get to follow each one along and see how his and Pamela’s lives unfold each time. That makes the impact of the different versions of their lives all the more striking. This life, he’s an amazingly wealthy investor. This life, he’s a hermit. I especially liked the life where they go public with their predictions and end up captives of the US government in a world turned much worse than the one they remember, plagued by wars and terrorism. A couple of parallells to recent events there.
The novel is incredibly well thought through and a lot of work is put into every detail. I half started to believe Grimwood was going through what he was describing. Jeff has to think about if a certain freeway exists yet when he chooses a road to travel. He is surprised by the youth of his parents. He has to consider (and try to remember) what kind of a relationship he had to particular people at that point in time.
And then, of course, after the nice times and the horrible times the skew catches up with him and he is back in the loveless marriage with Linda. I could feel the despair in my spine.
Finally, the ending. As I was reading the last twenty pages or so, I read faster and faster as I really wanted to know how the hell this book was going to end. I wasn’t disappointed; in fact the ending was almost totally satisfying. I believe I took something else away from it than Grimwood intended, though. He seems to have considered the ending upbeat, but to me it seemed quite horrible to suddenly be stuck with the rest of a single lifetime after having gotten used to replaying them. On the other hand, Linda’s words after “We need” tied the beginning of the book with the end of the book beautifully, and left me with a very real sense of hope.
I could go on talking about this book forever. I’ve probably left out half the stuff I wanted to put in this post. I’ll probably be back in minutes to post more in my own thread. But I’ll just finish here and say that I absolutely loved this book. It’s close to a perfect novel.
Does it have any other fans here?