The Immortalists review – a quartet facing the end of time

In Chloe Benjamin’s second novel, Klara is a stage magician with a signature act called the Jaws of Life. The trick is that there is no trick: the rope feat simply requires death-defying strength and audacity. In this haunting saga about Klara’s family, The Immortalists is less concerned with gimcrack sleights-of-hand than the acrobatics we undertake in order to cheat mortality.

In the summer of 1969 on New York’s Lower East Side, a Romany woman with “powers” offers each of the Gold children – Klara and her siblings Simon, Daniel and Varya – a prediction of the exact day they will die. Only Varya is vouchsafed old age and the fortune teller responds to her scepticism with some advice: “You wanna know the future? Look in the mirror.” Already teasing determinism and free will apart, Benjamin stands ready to magic this hokey premise into a prismatic philosophical conundrum.

Turning to each sibling in the order of their deaths, the novel sweeps through the ensuing half-century towards the present day. After Simon leaps into the late 1970s San Francisco gay scene “like a dog into water”, he seizes upon sex, drugs, ballet and ultimately romantic love with an urgent joy,  but the “gay cancer” claims him barely out of his teens.

Benjamin poses the same question for each Gold: will they die on the augured date because it is their destiny, or because the prediction draws them into an altered pattern of life choices?



Source: theguardian

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