The Immortalists

What if you were told when you were a child the exact day you would die? That’s the premise of Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists. The book shares the story of four brothers and sisters who all visit a fortune teller one day early in their lives and the woman tells them each, separately, the day they will die. The book then goes about telling the four separate stories about how each of the four carries/lives out the prophecy of the old woman.

Image of Cloe Benjamin and her book The Immortalists.

As I’ve said before, I like to read books that make me think when I’m reading them and make me keep thinking once I’m done. This is a book that does that, kind of like the death of a loved one makes one think about his/her own mortality while grieving.

Chloe Benjamin’s writing style is good. The story flowed and it took me a day or two to read the book. The cover is beautiful and I’m told mixed with Jewish symbolism involving the Tree of Life. Poetic.

But there were some things that bothered me about the book.

Overt Use of Sex

For one, I don’t know why we needed the description of Varya’s pubic area, breasts and nipples in the second and third sentences. For all the talk in writing schools about needing a winning first sentence and hook, this didn’t set up a dramatic question. Didn’t answer one either.

And then there was the story of Simon, the youngest brother who dies first, of AIDS in the late 1980s in San Francisco. Writer Benjamin decides we need to be taken through explicit descriptions of homosexual love scenes. Call me homophobic all you want, but that’s not something I care to read about and quite frankly, I skimmed through most of that section and it clearly didn’t affect my understanding of the outcome of the book. Ergo, it wasn’t necessary.

Conclusion

I bought the book because I think I saw on Amazon it’s one of the best-selling books so far in 2018. As I continue to work toward my reading goal of 101 literary books, I’m varying the scope of what I’m reading. This book was an okay read. As I said, there were parts of it I could and did do without. But an interesting question nonetheless. Would you want to know the day you were going to die? How would it affect how you lived?

My Reading List

In 2016, I began reading like a madman. In those days, my revisions to one of my manuscripts were in full swing and I intended to get a better idea of what was selling in the way of novels.

There’s only one good way to accomplish such a feat–reading everything in sight.

And so I did, and still have a stack of books with me constantly that are in a To Be Read pile.

I encourage you to check out my Reading List.