Why this book:   Selected by my Science Fiction reading group.  Though it was written in 19886 it won several awards  to include Worrld Fantasy Award for best novel in 1988.  Also apparently was the inspiration for the movie Ground  Hog Day.  I listened to it and was impressed with how the narrator read it. 

Summary in 3 Sentences:  Our protagonist Jeff Winston, has a heart attack at age 43 and watches himself die – then suddenly wakes up  aa himself,  at 18 years old in 1963 in his college dorm room with all of the memories he had as a 43 year old, and with the opportunity to start life anew as himself at age 18.  The story is of his choices and new adventures until he reaches the same date, and time again in 1988 and again dies and awakens again, somewhat later in is life than the first time.  This happens again and again, dying at the same date/time in each reliving, but waking up later in his original life.  In one of his lives, he finds and meets a woman who is having the same experience, and each life she lives ends at the same time and date as his.  They are able to meet again in future “replays” and much of the book is about their lives and traded insights dealing with this very surprising and strange fate. 

My Impressions:  I really enjoyed this book – engaging and fun to read as it progresses in profundity from Jeff Winston’s-  our protagonist’s – ability to live out all his adolescent/young man’s male fantasies of money/sex/power in his first cople of reincarnations, or “replays,” to a point where he seems to have fully scratched that itch, and his issues and  goals become more profound in their implications.  By the end of the book he is a man in his 40s but with a couple of centuries worth of experience. 

This book was published in 1986 and Jeff’s relived experiences coincide with much of my life -from 1963- 1988.  He re-experiences the John/Robert Kennedy assassinations, MLK’s assassination, the Vietnam War protests of the 60s, and the Cold War of the 70s and 80s.  He enjoys (again) the rise of the Beatles, and other popular music of the 60’s 70’s and 80’s, the counter-culture and sexual revolutions of the sixties and seventies and then the rise of the Yuppies in the 80s. And after he experiences them again and again, they become tireseome.  Most challenging to him was that he couldn’t share this experience and its challenges with anyone without being subjected to ridicule and potentially being committed to psychiatric care. 

The most powerful part of the book for me was when he connected with Pamela, a woman who was also in a replay cycle.  In trying to sort out their common experience and unravel and understand the implications of the replay phenomenon, they fell in love. And then they would both die again – on the same day in 1988 and each time they vowed to reconnect in their next life, beginning again 20+ years earlier. But that got complicated when they realized that they were being reborn in different times later in their lives – what they called the “skew”.    He might begin his next replay at age 23 and she, perhaps at age 16.  But in each case, when they were reborn in their next replay, they remembered all the lives they’d lived before, found a way to reconnect, but the skew made it each time more complicated – esp when one or the other had gotten married while waiting for the other to begin their replay -not knowing when or where. 

Again, lots of fun reading this book.  A very engaging and touching romance between Jeff and Pamela, dealing with truly difficult issues related to their unique experience.  Issues that came up for me were the superficiality of fulfilling primal desires for sex, pleasure, power and wealth,  and the ultimately lack of fulfillment from the freedom that comes with those.  Love, marriage, intimacy, loneliness, life purpose are all subtly issues in this fun and fascinating book.  What would I do were I reborn at age 18 – how different would it be from what Jeff did?  And if reincarnation is real  (it could be…) how complicated would it be to know all that one had experienced before, in previous incarnations, with whom, consequences and emotional impact.  

Really enjoyed this read – highly recommended for thoughtful people with a senee of fun.