335. The Immortalists
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Chloe Benjamin
Genre: Fiction
346 pages, published January 9, 2018
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
The Immortalists opens in 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side. The four adolescent Gold children seek out a mystical woman to hear their fortunes. When she tells each of them the date when they will die, her prophecy irrevocably defines and alters their lives. Youngest child Simon, who has the soonest death date in his 20’s and who is coming to terms with his homosexuality, escapes to San Francisco. Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy. Eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11. Bookish Varya becomes a noted longevity researcher.
Quotes
“She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory—to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child.”
“Most adults claim not to believe in magic, but Klara knows better. Why else would anyone play at permanence–fall in love, have children, buy a house–in the face of all evidence there’s no such thing?”
“When Klara plucks a coin from inside someone’s ear or turns a ball into a lemon, she hopes not to deceive but to impart a different kind of knowledge, an expanded sense of possibility. The point is not to negate reality, but to peel back its scrim, revealing reality’s peculiarities and contradictions. The very best magic tricks, the kind Klara wants to perform, do not subtract from reality. They add.”
“In New York, he would live for them, but in San Francisco, he could live for himself. And though he does not like to think about it, though he in fact avoids the subject pathologically, he allows himself to think it now: 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 color; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious.”
“But Varya disagreed. She knew that stories did have the power to change things: the past and the future, even the present. She had been an agnostic since graduate school, but if there was one tenant of Judaism with which she agreed, it was this: the power of words. They weaseled under door cracks and through keyholes. They hooked into individuals and wormed through generations.”
“Character is fate—that’s what he said. They’re bound up, those two, like brothers and sisters. You wanna know the future?” She points at Varya with her free hand. “Look in the mirror.”
“In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.”
My Take
While I found the main premise of The Immortalists to be fascinating, i.e. how would you act if you knew the date of your death, I felt like the book could have done a bit more with it. Still, it was well written and with compelling enough characters to keep me interested throughout.
