The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin

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.

• ISBN10: 0735213186
• ISBN13: 9780735213180
• Publish Date: 9 January 2018
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: G P Putnam's Sons
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 352
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780735213180

Reviews

[Artemis]

What would you do if you knew the date your death?

The Immortalists has a great premise, and was promising addition to my to read list. It ended up being a very underwhelming read for me for a few reasons.

The premise (bold above) gets shoved aside quickly for four short stories about the Gold siblings. The book starts with the young siblings visiting a woman who can tell them the day that they will die. Each sibling gets a different response that shapes how they view life and death.

The stories were cliche and obvious in their endings (and the characters). Simon is gay and living in San Francisco in the 80s. He contracts AIDS and dies young. Klara is a magician who has concerns with showmanship. She commits suicide on the night of her big Vegas debut. Daniel, a military doctor and married to a woman who does not want children, searches for the death teller and his life ends in a shoot out with the FBI agent. Varya’s story is odd. She’s a researcher focusing on the aging process, and as predicted will die at age 88 but we don’t see her death.

The story felt a little misguided and really did nothing to engage the responsibility of living with knowledge of the future. The directions were predictable. The writing was okay, but was filled with this weird sexual lanugage that didn’t quite weave into the story. The first sentence describes Varya as a thirteen year old girl just hitting puberty with a “patch of fur between her legs” and the section of Simon’s story is filled with almost raunchy descriptions of gentiles and sexual desire. It just felt strangely out of place and like Benjamin was trying to hard to fit into this “literary fiction” category.

Neither of those passages really contributed to the intellectual or emotional value of the story, and was a distraction to me while reading. There are some pieces in Daniel’s story where he begins to question religion and how it has shaped his life, but it ultimately does nothing to enhance the story any further.

This story had a lot of promise, but I would not recommend it to readers looking for the magical and lyrical type of “literary fiction”.

[girlinthepages]

I'll admit I didn't go into this book knowing much- mostly that is was about a group of siblings that know their death date after a chance encounter with a psychic when they are children (a terrible thing to find out but a great premise for a book). I had also heard it was pretty literary, but I was ready for it since contemporary literary fiction was my JAM in college. And while the plot of the book overall was interesting, I really wasn't blown away by anything happening here. A few thoughts:

+I liked how the book was divided into four distinct sections after the children's run in with the psychic, and when one sibling dies it picks up with the narrative of the next sibling with the closest "death date."
The characters were part of a large Jewish family and their parents immigrated to the US in the 1900s. It was super interesting to learn about their family's backstory and see how the Jewish faith and traditions were preserved in their family, especially through their mother, Gertie.

+I feel like I never really got to KNOW the characters, especially Simon- he felt very flat, one dimensional, and stereotypical. I was expecting to connect more with each sibling given how central each individual narrative was to the overall story.

+I did find it interesting to see how each sibling, in their own way, really fell pray to the self-fulfilling prophecy of their death date and how it really ruined each of their lives (even the ones who were given decades upon decades to live). There's also a secondary character who lurks in the background of each of their stories and ultimately plays a role in some of their deaths (even inadvertently) which I found to be an interesting plot element.

+I've seen a few other reviewers mention this, but there are a lot of graphic scenes in the beginning of the book that started to feel rather tasteless after a while and didn't feel like they added much to the story.

+I wish the book had focused more on the prophecies and the magical realism that seemed to be hyped up, but I found that aside from Klara's portion, it really just felt like a plain contemporary novel after the initial run in with the psychic.

Overall: An interesting concept for a novel, but nothing's super memorable that will make The Immortalists stand out among other literary fiction I've read.This review was originally posted on Girl in the Pages

[Quirky Cat]

I received a copy of The Immortalists from Bookish in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Would you live your life any differently if you knew when you were going to die? That’s the question The Immortalists wants us to ask ourselves; the question explored by the four main characters of this novel. The Gold siblings all had their fortunes told; specifically they were told which day they were going to die. They were not told how, and they were not required to share what they learned with their siblings.
If I was forced to try and sort this book into a specific genre, I think I would struggle with it. It’s different and totally unique. The closest category I can think of is fiction, but that doesn’t really cover it either. It doesn’t imply towards everything in this novel. If you’re looking for a read where you’ll truly connect with the characters, a read where you’ll feel for the characters, then this is probably a good pick for you.



Warnings first: So this probably goes without saying, but a story that explores the concept of how we live our lives before we die obviously also covers the death part of it. Two of the deaths are more graphic than the others (and no, I won’t say who dies or how many deaths there are in total). One sibling dies from a horrible disease, and the other from suicide. They’re pretty heart wrenching, to say the least. There is an animal that injures itself later in the book, which is pretty upsetting to read about. I want to make it very clear that she does live though, as that was something I was very very worried about when I was reading it (ironic, I know).
I’m not really sure what I was expecting when I started reading The Immortalists. But I can say for certain I got more than I was expecting. Going into this novel, I knew the basic concept; that four siblings were told when they were supposedly going to die. Beyond that I didn’t really know that much. Was the fortune teller correct? Did they even believe her? Did their belief shape how they lived their lives, and thus how/when they died? That was all waiting for me to learn.
The novel is more or less split into four even portions, with a quarter going to each of the four siblings. Simon and Klara’s stories are told first, followed by Daniel and Varya’s. It was fascinating to see how different each of the Gold children were, and how much that divide grew as they got older. Because of how different each child is, I think that there’s a good chance each reader will find a particular character they can really connect to.
Despite all the questions raised throughout the course of this book, there really aren’t any concrete answers delivered. I feel like we were allowed to form our own opinions and theories about everything, something I greatly appreciated.
I’m not going to lie and say that you’ll be smiling the whole way through this novel – you will cry. Or at least, I did. Chloe Benjamin did a wonderful job getting the reader to care about each of the characters (even when I felt myself unwilling to, as I was afraid to get attached to any of them, when I didn’t know who would live or die). It’s understandable that because of this connection between the characters and the reader that you will find yourself getting upset for them or feeling their loss very keenly when the time comes.
This book was outstandingly written, and I found myself even more impressed upon learning that this was Chloe Benjamin’s first novel. I never would have guessed that. I fully intend to keep an eye on her works, even if there’s a chance that she’ll make me cry again.


For more reviews, check out Quirky Cat's Fat Stacks