'The Immortalists' had a fantastic start - after hearing so much praise about it from customers I went out on a limb and bought a copy for myself. The premise is that in 1969 four siblings seek out a fortune teller who knows when people will die. 

 

What they hear will effect the rest of their lives. 

 

The book is broken out into four sections, one for each sibling in order of when they are predicted to die. Simon, saying only that he will die young, is convinced by his sister Klara to run away to San Francisco at 16 in the mid 70s and experiences all the love (and hedonism) of the era. We all know how that ends - but the writing was compelling enough to keep me interested.

 

It begins to fall apart during Klara's story. She is upset at her brother's death and the only one who knows that his death was on the date predicted by the fortune teller. She seeks to become a magician and a star but about halfway through her narrative it falls apart. Her problems were not unrealistic, far from it, but the spark had left the writing. 

 

That is really helpful criticism, but I can't put my finger on why I lost interest. This only got worse as we got into Daniel's story and I was skimming by the time I got to the eldest (and last surviving) Gold sibling. 

 

A lot of people like this one, I'll have to quiz some customers later and hear what they liked about the second half of the book.

The Immortalists - Chloe Benjamin Nothing more than a conjuring of cheap tricks

How would you live your life if you knew when you were going to die?

That’s the high-concept idea behind Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists, which opens in 1969 Brooklyn with the four Gold children, aged 7 to 13, visiting a fortune teller who gives each the exact date of his or her death. Three of the four are upset by their predictions, and each reacts differently in the following years. 

Simon leaves home at 16 and follows his sister to San Francisco where he can finally be himself but devastating his mother and alienating his other siblings in the process. Klara grieves by pouring herself into her lifelong passion of stage magic, eventually landing in Las Vegas for one last shot at stardom. Daniel makes good on his promise to become an army doctor, but as he approaches middle age, his career and mental health begin to falter. Varya, the oldest, goes into anti-aging research in a quest to help people live longer but discovers that longer doesn’t necessarily mean better. Each of the Gold children’s lives is a reaction to the fortune teller’s prediction, but are they doomed to their fates or simply moved by the power of suggestion? 

This book was like a slow-motion train wreck. I enjoyed the section about Simon in late 70’s/early 80’s San Francisco, but I always have a soft spot for an AIDS story. But as we move on to the remaining siblings, their stories grow more and more outlandish, the characters more and more unlikable, their decisions more and more inexplicable. And most of these characters are deeply unlikable — selfish, deceitful, uncommunicative — yet they’re also underdeveloped. Benjamin spends so much time explaining what her characters think that she fails to make them full human beings, so when they make stupid choices — and they all make some really stupid choices — it seems more in service to a pre-determined plot outline than what each character would naturally do in those situations.

One last complaint, and this is a huge pet peeve of mine. Benjamin throws in a couple of “twists”, by which I mean she uses questionable rhetorical misdirection followed later by gotcha! made ya look! The surprises are cheap and unearned and would have been completely unnecessary if she had simply developed vivid characters and told a compelling story. This book had lots of potential, and I know it's made a lot of critics' and readers' best-of-2018 lists, but it just didn't work for me, not as a work of fiction and not as thought experiment.

(This review was originally posted as part of Cannonball Read 10: Sticking It to Cancer, One Book at a Time.)

I really enjoyed this one, probably one my favorite reads this year. Four siblings in 1969 New York go see a fortune teller who tells each of them separately the dates of their deaths, and the prophecies affect how each of them live their lives from that moment on. The book is divided into four parts covering each of the siblings' lives, and every section, extensively researched to provide a vivid background, gave me things to think about and relate to and as a whole kept me interested. I liked the writing too, although there tends to be a lot of telling when it comes to the philosophical parts on issues such as fate vs. free will, being bold but reckless vs. being careful but restrictive. It's a gripping, memorable, complex piece of literary fiction with numerous thought-provoking points for discussion, including but not limited to family, faith, destiny, death and life itself.

Audiobook

I kept putting off requesting this book because I stopped reading family sagas in the early 1980s. But I kept reading the blurb over and over and finally thought why not. This book was so good! It's about 4 brothers and sisters and their life from an encounter with a psychic until their death. I liked that it didn't jump around between them but had four parts for each person. The family itself was so sad. All of the stuff they did or should have done, I just wanted to grab the fictional person by the shoulders and tell them that they matter. I loved the ending. I would definitely recommend this book.

Maggie Hoffman did a great job with the narration - both the men and women, young and old.

This one was entirely different than I'd imagined it would be, and that was fine. I like to be surprised. What was slightly lacking for me was why the Romani fortune teller had such an effect on these four kids. They were raised steeped in Judaism, at least by their father. They were first generation Americans, children of the Holocaust. They were intellectuals, despite the fact that the family had a background in magic. I couldn't get my head around why they were all so sure one visit with a fortune teller had power over them or why she would have knowledge about them. Whether it was real magic or not was never really examined.

 

As kids the characters were likable but as adults they were sorely lacking, and I can't just believe it's because of a prediction from childhood without a reason to suddenly believe in Romani fortune telling. I never got the reason, so while it was interesting and an OK read, it just didn't get over the top ever, nor did it dip low. It was an steady read that lovers of historical fiction (from very recent history) and family sagas will probably like. There were moments where I thought the Kabbalah (sp?) or Jewish mysticism would play more solidly into the plot, where medicine and science would prevail, where family ties might win out, but instead it was all about a date and death. I suppose the lesson, if we go with Simon, if we must have a lesson (I go looking for lessons when the story leaves me questioning I'm learning), is live life to the fullest while we can.