Replay

Rating:
Summary: Instant(ly forgettable) "Replay"
Review: I've read three time-travel novels in the last two weeks--"The Time Traveler's Wife," "The Man Who Folded Himself" and now "Replay"-- and felt déjà vu all over again as I endured yet another charmless protagonist who thinks the best use of time travel is to have sex as much as humanly possible. Yet again, foreknowledge is used to win sporting events and pick stocks without even a cursory comment on the cliché nature of the scheme and little concern for ethics. "Replay" is an endless drone of fortune-building and ill-advised romances that inevitably can't make the character happy, but with little insight into the philosophical implications. He never seems to learn how to live life -- only how not to live it.

Promise of a number of other 'replayers' and an explanation of the phenomenon didn't pan out. Absolutely nothing in the way of period detail save for citing the films and car models of the times. It's one thing to imply that reliving one's life is tedious; it's another to make the experience of reading about it tedious.


Rating:
Summary: What will you change if you were able to?
Review: "Replay" is a book that hits directly in the center of a universal fantasy: "What will you change in your life if you were able to do it?" I think there is no one, that at some point in his/hers life, hasn't wondered on this question.
I feel that that is why this book is such a compelling read.

Jeff dies suddenly of a heart attack at age of 43 after living an unsatisfactory life, but instead of going to Heaven or Hell or Nothingness he awakes at his college dormitory when he was 18 years old. First he is almost driven into madness (as it will occur to you or to me). Then little by little he is able to gain control of his new life and starts an amazing trip.
However when he reaches 43, he dies again. Is this the End? Of course not, it's a new start. He is launched, and the reader with him, into a seemingly endless quest.

Ken Grimwood, (unfortunately deceased) has constructed a novel that dwelt with fundamental questions as: Which is the sense of life? Are our actions inane? Is love attached to a person?
He broods on ethics, responsibility, altruism, selfishness, fatherhood and vocation amongst other significant issues.
So, is this a philosophical and boring book? No, not the least! It's a fast paced gripping and thought provoking novel! It earned his author the World Fantasy Award in 1986.

Just one more detail: take a careful look to one of the Replayed Lives that depicts what kind of world may arise from a ruthless America and remember it was written in 1986 way before the more dreadful recent events.
Have a nice reading!
Reviewed by Max Yofre.


Rating:
Summary: Stunning, involving, thoughtful, and beautifully written
Review: I first read this book shortly after it was published. I recently ran across a paperback copy in a used-book store, remembered how much I had enjoyed it (though I had forgotten most of the details), and picked it up for a re-read. And I'm glad I did. Grimwood (now deceased) wrote a few other novels dealing with time-traveling and ultra-long-livedness, but none of them enjoyed anything close to the success of this one, and that's a shame. The "what if" premise is very simple: What if death, for a very few of us, isn't permanent? What if you get to try again? Jeff Winston is in his forties, the news director of a small Florida television station, stuck in an unhappy marriage. And one day, while on the phone to his wife, he falls face-down on his desk, dead of a massive heart attack. And then wakes up, confused and extremely disoriented, to find himself back in his eighteen-year-old body at Emory in 1963, but with his full adult memory. He has a journalist's grasp of the public history of his own lifetime, including the winners of major sporting events, and a couple of shrewd bets on the Kentucky Derby and the World Series sets him up for life. Knowing what the social and technological trends are going to be, he makes all the right investments. The one thing he can't do, though, is relate to the people he used to know as though he were still eighteen, and that includes the girl with whom he was in love at the time, and the young woman who later became his wife. Worst of all, when he reaches that fatal day in 1988, he dies on schedule -- and has to start all over again. What's the point? Why bother trying to accomplish anything? The author examines all the aspects of this unique sort of futility, which becomes almost a Kubler-Ross "stages of acceptance" process. And then Jeff's situation changes. He's not the only "replayer." Grimwood has an excellent grasp on events and trends of the 1960s and `70s and how they might be taken advantage of with foreknowledge, which I found particularly fascinating because the main character and I are within two months of being the same age. Though I have to say, he paid more attention to what was going on in the world than I did as an undergraduate. I'm tucking my copy of this one away for another re-read in a few more years.