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Summary
Summary
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Washington Post * NPR * Entertainment Weekly * Real Simple * Marie Claire * New York Public Library * LibraryReads * The Skimm * Lit Hub * Lit Reactor
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"A captivating family saga."-- The New York Times Book Review
"This literary family saga is perfect for fans of Celeste Ng and Donna Tartt."-- People Magazine (Book of the Week)
If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?
It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children--four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness--sneak out to hear their fortunes.
The prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in '80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.
A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.
Author Notes
Chloe Benjamin is an American author, born in San Francisco, California. She is a graduate of Vassar College and received her MFA in Fiction at the University of Wisconsin. In addition to writing, she teaches workshops on the business of publishing. Her first novel, The Anatomy of Dreams, received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award. The Immortalist is her second novel and was published in January 2018.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her second novel, Benjamin (The Anatomy of Dreams) constructs an imaginative and satisfying family saga. In 1969, the four rambunctious Gold children, Simon, Klara, Daniel, and Varya, visit a psychic on Manhattan's Lower East Side who predicts the date each of them will die. The novel then follows how the siblings deal with news of their expiration dates. In the late '70s, Klara and Simon, the youngest, run off to San Francisco, where the closeted Simon becomes a dancer and Klara a magician and stage illusionist who believes she can commune with the spirits of dead relatives. In 2006, Daniel, a married army doctor based in Kingston, N.Y., learns that the psychic who foretold their fates is a con artist wanted by the FBI, and attempts to track her down. In 2010, Varya, the eldest Gold, is a longevity researcher who feels closest to the rhesus monkeys she uses for her experiments. But one day, a journalist named Luke interviews her and, in the process, changes the course of her life. The author has written a cleverly structured novel steeped in Jewish lore and the history of four decades of American life. The four Gold siblings are wonderful creations, and in Benjamin's expert hands their story becomes a moving meditation on fate, faith, and the family ties that alternately hurt and heal. Agent: Margaret Riley King, WME Entertainment. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Restless during the seismic summer of 1969 on New York's Lower East Side, the four Gold siblings, descendants of Jews who fled violent persecution overseas, sneak off to see a fortune-teller, who tells them each, separately, the date of his or her death. So begins Benjamin's bewitching and provocative second novel (following The Anatomy of Dreams, 2014). Each character's story is saturated with paradox in this delving family saga laced with history and science and a heart-pounding inquiry into self, inheritance, fate, and the mind-body connection. At 16, Simon runs away to San Francisco, comes out as gay, and discovers his gift for dance just as AIDS begins its shattering assault. Magician Klara calls herself the Immortalist. Daniel is a military doctor; scientist Varya is conducting a longevity study with rhesus monkeys. All are afflicted by the poison of prophecy. Aligned in her artistic command, imagination, and deep curiosity about the human condition with Nicole Krauss, Dara Horn, and Stacey D'Erasmo, Benjamin asks what we want out of life. Duration? Success? Meaning? Who do we live for? Do our genes determine our path? How does trauma alter us? Benjamin has created mesmerizing characters and richly suspenseful predicaments in this profound and glimmering novel of death's ever-shocking inevitability and life's wondrously persistent whirl of chance and destiny.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, by Antonio Damasio. (Vintage, $17.) Damasio, a well-known neuroscientist, makes a case for the centrality of feelings and emotions in human history. Unlike other accounts that focus on cognition and are largely unconcerned with the role of affect, his book reframes the history of humans and the natural world, putting feelings at its core. THE PISCES, by Melissa Brodér. (Hogarth, $16.) In this darkly funny novel, a depressed and stalled graduate student finally meets her dream date - who turns out to be half fish. As our reviewer, Cathleen Schine, put it, Brodér "approaches the great existential subjects - emptiness, loneliness, meaninglessness, death and boyfriends - as if they were a collection of bad habits." SHARP: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, by Michelle Dean. (Grove, $17.) In breezy biographical chapters on 10 writers, including Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Pauline Kael, Dean explores their successes and failures and their relationship to feminism. Above all, she considers the doubleedged nature of the word "sharp": It's a compliment with an undertow of terror, she writes. "Sharpness, after all, cuts." THE IMMORTALISTS, by Chloe Benjamin. (Putnam, $16.) In late 1960s New York, the Gold children visit a fortuneteller known for predicting the dates when people will die. The four siblings grapple with the prophesies over the next 50 years: One heads West for San Francisco, and another becomes a scientist, researching the possibility of living forever. For each, the knowledge turns out to be both a blessing and curse, and all must try to balance their desires and choices with their predetermined destinies. NO ASHES IN THE FIRE: Coming of Age Black and Free in America, by Darnell L. Moore. (Bold Type, $16.99.) Growing up gay and black in Camden, N. J., Moore had a brutal, violent childhood. In his book, he sets out to make visible the "forces that rendered my blackness criminal, my black manhood vile, my black queerness sinful," he writes, but despite the cruelty he faced, he suffuses his memoir with humanity. THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR, by Alan Hollinghurst. (Vintage, $16.95.) Hollinghurst's emotionally resonant novel charts nearly a century of queer life and desires in Britain. When readers meet the title character, he's an object of intense desire among a group of male friends at Oxford. Years later, a sex scandal torpedoes his political career, leaving his gay son to claim the possibilities his father never had.
Guardian Review
Debauchery and wild times turn to frustration and fear after four siblings are told the exact dates on which they will die If you knew the day you were going to die, how would you choose to live? This is the question at the heart and on the cover of American author Chloe Benjamins second novel, The Immortalists (her first, The Anatomy of Dreams, was not published in the UK). Given the catchy Hollywood-style pitch, it is little surprise that the book has been snapped up by publishers across the globe and a TV adaptation is already in the works. Less predictable is just how engaging this bittersweet novel turns out to be. Benjamins story starts in a sweltering New York apartment during the summer of 1969. The four Gold siblings are restless. Something, it seems, is happening to everyone but them. The oldest, Varya, is 13, the youngest, Simon, only seven, but it is 11-year-old Daniel who hears about the woman on Hester Street who can predict the exact date you will die, and nine-year-old Klara who summons up the courage to knock on her door. The experience unnerves them all. None of them wants to talk about it. Not until nine years later, shaken by the unexpected death of their father, do they finally share their dates with one another. The novel unfolds over four parts, one for each of the siblings in order of their predicted deaths. Simon, who will die shortly after his 20th birthday, is determined not to risk wasting a moment: What if the woman on Hester Street is right and the next few years are his last? The mere thought turns his life a different colour; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious. Abandoning their widowed mother, he and Klara escape New York for San Francisco, where Simon comes out and throws himself into the sexual free-for-all of the pre-Aids gay scene. Mercurial Klara, who will die in her 30s, pursues her lifelong fascination with magic, developing an act that will take her to Las Vegas. The two elder siblings stay in New York to take care of their mother. Daniel becomes a military doctor, Varya a scientist whose academic research with primates investigates the prolonging of life. The novel begins in Technicolor, with all the eager vitality of youth, and gradually darkens as loss accumulates In an interview Benjamin has described her novel as a book that explores how to live with uncertainty It is an unbelievable, absurd paradox that we have to put one step in front of the other every day without knowing which one will be our last. Taking each of her four characters in turn, she asks, is the knowledge a curse or a blessing? Does it liberate you to live life to the full or does it hobble you, stripping you of agency? What is it that you choose to believe in? By leaving open the question of whether the clairvoyant is a seer or a fraud, Benjamin allows each of the siblings to react in their own way, in accordance with their nature. It is the clairvoyant herself who quotes Heraclituss epigram: character is fate. You wanna know the future? she asks Varya. Look in the mirror. Benjamin is trying to do a lot in this novel and it doesnt always work. Sometimes she shows her workings too clearly: musing on her siblings, Varya wonders how they could diverge so dramatically in their temperaments, their fatal flaws. The investigation Varya is conducting into human longevity is too heavy-handedly metaphorical for its own good. Benjamin has researched her material meticulously and too much information makes its way undigested on to the page; there are also several moments where the plot veers towards the preposterous. But despite these cavils The Immortalists worms its way under your skin. Benjamin writes with verve and charm and her four protagonists are resolutely real. She is particularly good at the sibling bond, the unbreakable ties that bind brothers and sisters together even as they drive each other to distraction. The novel begins in Technicolor, with all the eager vitality of youth, and gradually slows and darkens as the weight of loss accumulates, casting a long shadow over the siblings who remain. It is a testament to Benjamins skill that, as her story pulls focus from the wild nightclubs of the Castro and the glitter of Las Vegas to life in the suburbs, as youthful exhilaration and recklessness give way to grief and anger and frustration and fear, the novel itself does not narrow but instead grows deeper and more absorbing. As for the question posed on the books cover, Benjamin offers no easy answers. I am willing to predict that The Immortalists will see book groups across the UK vigorously debating the issue. - Clare Clark.
Library Journal Review
An Edna Ferber Prize winner for The Anatomy of Dreams, Benjamin opens her second novel with four children in 1969 New York daringly visiting a fortune-teller said to be able to predict the date of one's death. Elder siblings Daniel and Varya grow up to become an army doctor and a scientist, respectively, while rebellious Klara works as a magician in Las Vegas and the insouciant youngest, Simon, finds love and dance in San Francisco. Yet thinking they know when they will die powerfully shapes their lives, often to their detriment, and we see each sibling struggling with this burden in four distinct narratives. How differently would their lives have turned out had they not made that visit? Could Benjamin have told the story of four close and sometimes troubled siblings without recourse to this hint of magic? The answer to that last question is yes, as the narratives she offers are intriguingly intertwined and beautifully rendered. Yet the added dimension proves effective while feeling entirely natural, and readers can believe what they want of the fortune-teller's power. VERDICT Both thought-provoking and entertaining, this title is highly recommended for a wide range of readers. [See Prepub Alert, 7/3/17.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.