摘要：The Life to Come is the product of a ferociously intelligent, formidably ambitious, and prodigiously gifted author. It is the fifth novel by Sri-Lankan born Michelle de Kretser, although in its format of five loosely linked stories that share only a few characters in common, it strains our conventional notion of the genre. It is a work that also challenges the ability of its readers to pay proper attention. The Life to Come straddles space and time, consisting of recollections of the past interspersed with present experiences, and with the action playing out in one country and then another. The first and second sections of the novel take place in Sydney, the third in Paris, the fourth in Sydney, and the fifth in pre-independence Ceylon, in post-independence Sri Lanka, and back in Sydney. Much of the novel is set in Australia’s boom years of the early twenty-first century, when mining money funded the privileged lives led by the upper middle-class progressives who feature largely in its vast and varied cast of characters.
