Readers,
Was on the phone last night with the beloved Sister, who had just emerged from an 11-hour Saturday shift in the hospital where she's a doctor. I had just emerged from a 4-hour movie marathon on my sofa, after getting pleasantly tipsy at an afternoon BBQ. So there you are. Let me tell you something: if you've never had to take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror after saying "I had a stressful week" to someone who just logged seventy hours on an oncology ward, count yourself lucky. We have not all been so blessedly tactful.
My sister deals with life and death every day, but I don't (thank goodness), which is probably why I found The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin so affecting. The premise of the novel is this: in 1969 four siblings visit a gypsy woman, each entering her apartment alone, each leaving with a new piece of information - the exact date of their own death. The novel is in four sequential parts, each following one of the siblings in the years preceding their demise. There is Simon, who runs away to San Francisco in the 80s. There is Klara, who goes with him but cherishes her own dream of becoming a magician. There's Daniel, the steady-freddy doctor. And Varya, the eldest and most responsible of the four, who begins as a relatively normal do-gooder, and ends as a control-freak, obsessed with finding the cure to ageing by testing low-calorie diets on monkeys. Bet you didn't see that coming.
The momentum of this book moves with the momentum of these character's lives, which is, in turn, dictated by the impending dates of their deaths. If you knew you were going to die young, you'd probably live harder - and so too are the opening sections of this book more urgent, galloping toward tragedy. The back half of the book is gentler, but also more nuanced.
In the end, this book is driven by a premise that renders these stories at once completely compelling and utterly predictable. The first chapter tells you exactly when each story will end. Thus, when you are told in Chapter 1 that a young, gay man has only a few years to live, and then you find, just a couple chapters later, that he has moved to San Francisco just before the beginning of the AIDs epidemic, it doesn't take rocket science to figure out how his story ends. But that doesn't mean it doesn't sucker punch you in the gut when you get there.
Let me be clear - there's nothing wrong with the predictability of this book. In fact, I think that's part of the point. It takes dramatic irony to its zenith. It gives the readers all the information they could ever ask for and then asks back: did you really want that? Don't you think you had better be more careful about what you wish for?
Indeed, for me, it was the first and the final of the four stories in The Immortalists that left me with the most questions. Would I rather die young or have to outlive my family? Would I rather live hard for a few years, as Achilles chose, or stick around, and be the spine in a body that's starting to decay? Which is braver? Which is harder?
It's a testament to Chloe Benjamin that she takes these timeworn questions and massages them into something new, fresh, and occasionally heartbreaking. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that there's a few things missing from this novel (there's only the slightest gestures toward faith and organized religion, which is astonishing in a book about death and meaning), and that the book occasionally relies on plot devices in a somewhat inorganic way (nothing like a secret relative revealing himself in the closing chapters), but none of that matters much. This is a story worth reading, not just because it's good writing, but because it's about questions worth asking.
Here is one of Chloe's character's on the verge of death, ready and willing, prepared by the knowledge he's had since childhood. Let's hope we might all be lucky enough to have a little of this grace in our final moments: "For so long, he hated the [fortune-teller] woman, too. How, he wondered, could she give such a terrible fortune to a child? But now he thinks of her differently, like a second mother or a god, she who showed him the door and said: Go."