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A time-travel classic in the tradition of Jack Finney's Time and Again, Ken Grimwood's acclaimed novel Replay asks the provocative question: "What if you could live your life over again, knowing the mistakes you'd made before?" Forty-three-year-old Jeff Winston gets several chances to do just that. Trapped in a tepid marriage and a dead-end job, he dies in 1988 and wakes up to find himself in 1963, at the age of eighteen, staring at his dorm room walls at Emory University. It's all the same...but different: Jeff knows what the future holds. He knows who will win every World Series...every Kentucky Derby...even how to win on Wall Street. The one thing he doesn't know is: Why has he been chosen to replay his life? And how many times must he win-and lose-everything he loves? Winner of the 1988 World Fantasy Award for best novel and published in eleven languages, Replay unravels the answers in a masterful skein that captivates our imagination.… (more)
BeckyJG: A protagonist who lives his life over and over, remembering the entirety of it each time, with the opportunity to do things differently, as well.
BookshelfMonstrosity: Life after Life and Replay feature characters who live multiple lives against their wills; the complications of dying and coming back to life form the core of each novel and create moving, sometimes funny, always thought-provoking situations.… (more)
Great premise. Starts off promising and chugs along nicely. But about 75% in it slows way down and meanders. It gets tangled in things that have nothing to do with the premise. The secondary character, Pam, is not as developed and fully flushed out. I didbt care at all about her. Jeff I Liked. The narrator was good, but needs a few more accents to improve the overall feel of the characters. He also needs to learn how to pronounce certain names. Its is not Joe Pepitonee. It is Joe Pepitone. Short e, not long ( )
Considered the original long form Groundhog day story before the Bill Murray/Harold Ramis movie. (there was a short story which predated it as well) A quick read, similar to All you Need is Kill. Enjoyable, though with a bit too much sexual content for my liking. But a nice focus on building authentic relationships. Interesting view. Some threads and ideas which are not developed. Apparently Grimwood was planning a sequel (an epilogue seems to give an opening for one), before he passed away. Wonder if somehow it would be published. I would probably read it.
Despite being an early take on the now oversaturated reliving life genre, this was unexpectedly fresh. It doesn't make the mistake of getting bogged down in minutiae or trying to bullshit about the metaphysics of the scenario itself. In a Groundhog Day fashion that's not the point. Rather it's the meditation on the roads not travelled that shines; a plausible and very human set of reactions and counter reactions to having an opportunity to do it all again, starting with the usual responses to this hypothesis ("if I knew what was gonna happen I'd make millions on betting and the markets"), and letting that play out as the ultimately empty hedonistic fantasy it is. There's a lot of life philosophy at work behind the repeated lives, but not in a preachy way. ( )
As an Atlanta native, I should have felt affinity for our Emory-educated protagonist. But the details - streets; neighborhoods, landmarks - while familiar, were just distracting to me.
If I still believed I had all the time in the world, I might have finished this book. The writing is pretty good and the tale has me mildly curious about where it's headed. Alas, our Emory guy's fourth (fifth?) time through has taken an interesting turn, but it's just not compelling enough to compete with my Want to Read shelf.
With my own mortality bearing down on me, I'm less interested in Emory guy's life choices and regrets than in my own ... chief among them, all the great books I haven't read (yet!) Reading unsatisfying ones is a luxury I can no longer afford.
December 2020 Mineral Wells, TX Kindle Nashville Lib Page 166 (39%) ( )
If you’ve seen the movies ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ and ‘Groundhog Day’ you’ve got the plot of Replay. The novel begins with the death of 43-year-old Jeff Winston — who immediately re-awakens a quarter century earlier in his college dorm as an 18-year-old version of himself. He begins to relive his life with all his memory of his previous life intact. And the same thing happens again and again, always dying at the age of 43. He tries to correct mistakes he made the first time around, though these sometimes lead to bigger mistakes. Some of the book overlaps with Stephen King’s wonderful time travel book about trying to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Much of it consists of spot-on memories of life in the 1960s and 1970s. And much of it is quite bleak (unlike the two movies mentioned earlier, which were comedies). Though I was not entirely satisfied with the ending, I can’t think of an alternative. Highly recommended. ( )
Jeff Winston was on the phone with his wife when he died.
Quotations
The future: hideous plagues, a revolution in sexual attitudes achieved and then reversed, triumph and tragedy in space, city streets haunted by null-eyed punks in leather and chains and spiked pink hair, death-beams in orbit around the polluted, choking earth...Christ, Jeff thought with a shudder, from this viewpoint his world sounded like the most nightmarish of science fiction.
"Chateaugay, at eleven-to-one odds. He sold the Chevy, his books, stereo, and record collection.... ...Now he had to place a bet, a large one. But how?"
All life includes loss. It's taken me many, many years to learn to deal with that, and I don't expect I'll ever be fully resigned to it. But that doesn't mean we have to turn away from the world, or stop striving for the best that we can do and be. We owe that much to ourselves, at least, and we deserve whatever measure of good may come of it.
Last words in main story: The possibilities, Jeff knew, were endless.
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Last words in epilogue: Those years, those familiar and long-past years from 1988 to 2017, were his to live again, knowing the mistakes he'd made before. This time, Peter Skjoren vowed, he would do it right.
A time-travel classic in the tradition of Jack Finney's Time and Again, Ken Grimwood's acclaimed novel Replay asks the provocative question: "What if you could live your life over again, knowing the mistakes you'd made before?" Forty-three-year-old Jeff Winston gets several chances to do just that. Trapped in a tepid marriage and a dead-end job, he dies in 1988 and wakes up to find himself in 1963, at the age of eighteen, staring at his dorm room walls at Emory University. It's all the same...but different: Jeff knows what the future holds. He knows who will win every World Series...every Kentucky Derby...even how to win on Wall Street. The one thing he doesn't know is: Why has he been chosen to replay his life? And how many times must he win-and lose-everything he loves? Winner of the 1988 World Fantasy Award for best novel and published in eleven languages, Replay unravels the answers in a masterful skein that captivates our imagination.
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Replay is the account of 43-year-old radio journalist Jeff Winston, who dies of a heart attack in 1988 and awakens back in 1963 in his 18-year-old body as a student at Atlanta's Emory University. He then begins to relive his life with intact memories of the next 25 years, until, despite his best efforts at cardiac health, he dies of a heart attack, again, in 1988. He immediately returns to 1963, but several hours later than the last "replay". This happens repeatedly with different events in each cycle, each time beginning from increasingly later dates (first days, then weeks, then years, then ultimately decades). Jeff soon realizes that he cannot prevent his death in 1988, but he can change the events that occur before it, both for him, and for others.
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Story about being reborn & living yor same life again with all you previous lifes memories
Wikipedia in English (1)
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