Review | The Immortalists

Title: The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

Date Published: January 9, 2018

Dates Read: June 18-28, 2021

Current Goodreads Rating: 3.71/5

Not to start this review on a kind of heavy note, but I never want to know how or when I'm going to die. I'm already an anxious person (thanks 2020!) I don't need to walk around life acting like I'm in Final Destination. That being said there is a kind of morbid curiosity about death. I mean every year you pass the eventual anniversary of the day you die and you don't even know about it. I'd like to think that 15 year old me or even 9 year old me wouldn't want to know how they die either, but I'm not 100% sure. What if I'm going to die in some kind of spectacular way? But on the other hand, what if I die alone?

Trigger Warning: Obviously this book talks about death, but more specifically it covers suicide and gun violence so if those are topics that may trigger you keep yourself safe and maybe skip this book.

Ok, what happens? The Gold siblings have a secret. There's a fortune teller in town and she's apparently incredibly accurate at predicting the deaths of those who come looking for her. Varya, the oldest, is understandably nervous - a feeling she shares with Simon, the youngest - but Daniel, the second born, and Klara, the youngest daughter, are fearless. However, what they learn shakes each individual Gold sibling.

As the years go on, the siblings separate. Some stay in New York, others migrate across the country to San Fransisco, but all of them remember what their date especially as the first date gets closer. How will the knowledge of their mortality change and shape them?

Ok, what did I think? It was probably around the end of the second section - told from Klara's point of view - that I realized Benjamin had been exploring each sibling's reaction to knowing their fate. It was honestly heartbreaking to watch each sibling in their own way fight the mystical woman's prediction.

I want to break down each individual sibling's reaction to their death date, but obviously that means I'm going to have to spoil somethings about this book. Personally, I don't think it will really ruin that much of the story for you - Benjamin's writing is gorgeous and I can't do it justice in my clumsy retelling here - but if you are wanting to keep things a surprise maybe skip the next four bullet points.

• Simon, the youngest, is told he's going to die young. Very young. Instead of letting that information freeze him into not living a full life, he swings wildly in the other direction. He's a gay Jewish man living in the 1980s and he wants a chance to find love without the suffocating embrace of his mother at home in New York. He escapes to San Francisco with his sister, Klara, and lives his life to the fullest. After all, he's going to die young so he might as well live it up while he can, right? Can you see where his story is going now?

• Klara, the second youngest, will at least live to her 30s so she decides that life is too short to not strive to do something and be someone becomes a mildly successful magician on the streets of San Francisco. The ghost of Simon haunts her from place to place and her alcoholism doesn't help much either. On the night of her first big act at a Las Vegas casino she climbs the stairs to the penthouse suite and throws a noose over the hanging chandelier. The fortune teller told her she was going to die that night, didn't she? There's obviously no way of fighting her prediction so Klara might as well let it happen.

• David, the second oldest, suffers after losing his two youngest siblings. It was his idea to go to the stupid mystical woman in the first place and his date is coming closer. Maybe, if he can find her, he can reverse this curse and save who's left. Or maybe he can make her pay for the pain that she has caused his family. As his last few days peter out he's desperate to find her and make her hurt like he has and that, inevitably is his downfall.

• Varya, the oldest, has the longest lifespan - into a future we haven't seen yet - but she lives in fear of what can kill her. She suffers from OCD and extreme germophobia and has devoted her life to research on how to increase longevity. Her life pretty much stopped when she and her siblings met the mystic woman and every loss Varya has suffered since then has been a nail in her coffin.

It became incredibly obvious to me that this story wasn't just about death and the destruction of one family, but about inevitability. Simon knew he was going to die young so he did whatever he wanted recklessly because he knew it was going to be taken away and, in a cruel twist of fate, it was because of his recklessness that he died young. Klara suffered from severe depression, yes, but when she died she did it because she knew the mystic woman had predicted it - her death was inevitable so why not just embrace it? David was driven by guilt and grief and a strong desire to make things right and he died on his predicted day because of it.

Only Varya really tests that theory of inevitability and even then we don't know for sure if she beats it. The story ends before we make it to her death date, but we do get to see the bleakness of a life living in fear of dying and it really made me question the idea behind this story. Who of the Gold siblings were in the wrong? Was it Simon, Klara, and David who addressed the inevitability of their death head on and allowed it to take control of them or was it Varya who chose to do whatever she could in order to live longer? Is it better to live a long life or a full life?

It seems pretty obvious to me here and now that a full life would be better. You get to see more, do more, and achieve more, but if that's at the cost of a short life it's a bitter pill to swallow. I'm still in my twenties so death is a terrifying thing to consider. There's so much I haven't done yet that I want to do so, with that logic, a longer life is better, right? The arguments keep circling in my head over and over. That's why I enjoyed this book so damn much. It was beautifully written, with characters that broke my heart, and it's message was perfectly confusing and has stuck with me for days after I read the last page.

This review was a heavier one than past reviews, but writing it almost felt therapeutic and reading The Immortalists felt a little bit like that as well. I feel like I look at life a little bit differently now and I highly recommend you check it out to see if your vision on life changes as well.

Long Story Short:

• Is a long life better than a full life? I still don't know

• Never go see a mystic woman who claims she can tell you when you're going to die

• I have got to stop getting so emotionally attached to book characters. They only hurt me in the long run

My Rating: 5/5