Review | The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
There’s an inescapable temptation, even need, when it comes to knowing the future. Our planners and Google calendars parcel the weeks and months ahead by the minute. We find ourselves clicking on Buzzfeed quizzes claiming to reveal when we’ll meet our soulmate based off the sandwich we build. And then, of course, there are matters of life and death. In her latest novel The Immortalists, Chloe Benjamin asks the intriguing question we’ve all probably entertained at some point in our lives: If you knew when you were going to die, how would you live?
It’s New York City, 1969. After hearing rumours of a mysterious traveling psychic, four siblings, drawstring purse jangling with saved-up allowances, sneak out to get their fortunes told. One by one, they are told the exact dates of their deaths. The prophecies shape their lives as we follow each of the Gold siblings over the next five decades. Simon, the sweetest and youngest, escapes to San Francisco in search of dreams and love; rebellious, dreamy Klara strives to become a Las Vegas magician; Daniel grasps for security as an army doctor; and the eldest, Vanya, attempts to find immortality by devoting her life to longevity research.
The book is divided into four parts, each revolving around a Gold sibling and how they deal with the knowledge of their futures. Throughout, Ms. Benjamin prompts another related, incisive question: Does this knowledge free you to live, or constrain you? In other words, faced with the reality of your imminent death, do you live life, or live long? On one end of the spectrum, Simon throws himself into a whirlwind of dancing and a string of lovers in San Francisco, desperate to experience all that life has to offer. On the other, Vanya lives a strictly regimented and lonely life as a scientist in an effort to prolong her lifespan. Through each of the four stories, readers are presented with varying shades of this spectrum of life and death.
There are without a doubt moments when you want to take the characters by their shoulders, give them a good shake, and ask them what the hell they’re doing. But these moments of frustration are simultaneously softened by feelings of understanding, pity and relief. Simon’s story is especially enjoyable to read — and equally as heartbreaking — for this reason. Simon shuns his family and lives a fast, frenzied, and virtually solipsistic life, seeking a hedonistic paradise suspended from reality. Though a reader might initially find this kind of behaviour selfish and immature, the novel reminds us constantly of the prophecy that hangs over the characters’ heads, making us realize that if we were in their position, we may not act so differently ourselves. It’s a reminder that the Gold siblings are people, after all, human in their struggles with the knowledge of their own mortal limits, with the unknowable.
Ms. Benjamin’s melodious writing and wry narrative voice, deftly woven with hints of foreshadowing, render The Immortalists into a gritty, modern fable. The colourful descriptions infuse the grey realities of 1969 New York with hints of fairytale fantasy — my favourite image was of the purse that the Gold siblings bring for the fortuneteller, heavy with coins, sagging on the floor like a jellyfish. The author’s love and awe for the cities she writes about — New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas — are also evident in the meticulous details of street names, landmarks and the social milieu of the times. The characters and their psyches, too, are vividly constructed, breathing life into these places, these people and our imaginations.
The Immortalists is a thoughtful, eye-opening book about many things, like life, death, family and love, to name a few. It is also, however, about possibilities — these unseen and overlooked windows of magic in reality:
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.
These sentences from the novel capture the real magic of The Immortalists — and of writing as a craft, a tool, an art: They bring to life, and force us to see, the possibilities inherent in our mortal lives, this very human magic.
Rating: 5/5
