The Life to Come: this year’s Miles Franklin winner is a brilliant character study

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Abstract

Michelle de Kretser’s The Life To Come, which has won the 2018 Miles Franklin Award, begins with an epigraph from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame:

CLOV: Do you believe in the life to come?
HAMM: Mine was always that.

This tragicomic exchange sets up, brilliantly, the novel that follows. When I asked de Kretser about her selection of this quote, she replied that she is interested in the hollowness behind the lives of her characters. Each falls short of the life they might have lived; each hears the echo of a life that could have been; and that echo hollows out the life they are in fact living.
Original languageEnglish
Pages1-3
Number of pages3
Volume855-856
No.8-9
Specialist publicationThe Conversation
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Aug 2018

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