by Jonathan Evison ★★★★☆
The main character and narrator of Again and Again is Eugene Miles, a 105-year-old man living at Desert Greens, an eldercare care facility in California. Despite his advanced age, he is apparently of relatively sound mind and body, and spends his days working on puzzles and reading history. One day, a new cleaning person named Angel arrives at Desert Greens, and Eugene and Angel begin to form a friendship. During the 20 minutes it takes Angel to clean his room each day, Eugene regales him with tales of his past lives. That's right, "lives", plural -- while Eugene's "current body" is 105 years old, he contends that he has been reincarnated several times, and he's actually closer to 1100 years old, tracing his first life back to Spain "during the golden age of Abd al-Rahman III" (around 920 A.D.). In addition, he claims that he was a member of Lewis and Clark's expedition and one as Oscar Wilde's cat. Plus, with 105 years behind him, he has plenty of stories from his current life as well.
For the first 150 pages, the novel alternates between Eugene sharing a story from one of his lives, stopping the story at a cliffhanger, and then "jumping back to real life" where Angel reacts with something along the lines of "oh, dog, you can't leave me hanging like that!" It's annoying, and after it happened the 3rd or 4th time, it started to be insufferable. I was rapidly beginning to lose interest in the book and the characters.
But then something changed. Angel is confronted by one of the eldercare facility administrators, who took the job at Desert Greens specifically because Eugene was there. Despite Eugene's steadfast insistence and incredible (and 100% consistent) recall of details that suggest he actually was reincarnated several times, there are things that we, at the whim of our unreliable narrator, now find out are untrue about his current life. For starters, he's not actually 105. There are also components of his current-life story that have pieces that are true, but more in the way that Verbal Kint stole hints from the room to tell his story in The Usual Suspects. That revelation took a novel that was dying on the vine for me and reinvigorated it. Did Eugene lie about everything? Is he actually crazy? Is he partially crazy? Is he fully sane, and just embellishing small things to preserve a narrative that helped him play out his last days more peacefully? I wanted to discover the actual truth.
The back half of the book gradually reveals that truth, at least about Eugene's current life. The publisher's summary suggests that it's a story about the power of Eugene's enduring love for "Gaya", his flame from 10th century Spain, saying that "he first lucked upon true love only to lose it, and spend the next thousand years trying to recapture it." That is certainly a component of the book, but it's not handled especially well. For all of the details Eugene shares during his time as "Euric" in Spain, it's hard to believe that his time with Gaya, as described, would cultivate a thousand year obsession. It wasn't even love (which, perhaps, is the point), but rather a one-sided obsession of a young man. Based on the summary, I was expecting some type of Jack-and-Rose Titanic love story for the ages; it is definitely not that. Its mischaracterization helps to reinforce the potential of Eugene's craziness; if that was the intention, I applaud the author.
So, throw out the book description -- this novel is more about an unreliable narrator and the reader trying to uncover the truth about him. Once I got to that 150-pages-in transition point, it kept my attention. I won't be avidly recommending it to anyone, but I was generally satisfied.