The Immortalists

When Death Knocks

The lives of four Gold siblings are altered when they find out when they are going to die. Does this knowledge become a self-fulfilling prophecy? That is the question Cloe Benjamin’s fascinating new novel, The Immortalists, tries to answer.

One summer in 1969, bored and bothered by the sticky heat, Varya, Daniel, Klara and Daniel Gold, go to meet a fortuneteller or “rishika” as their Indian friend Rubina calls her. The strange-looking and spooky gypsy woman tells them all the date of their death. They do not tell the others, and profess not to care, but the secret they keep in their minds affects them more than they realise.

Benjamin then follows the lives of all four, who seem to carry a cloud of darkness around them. The youngest, Simon, knows that he is going to die young, so he escapes from home, his overbearing mother, Gertie, and a dull future as the manager of his father’s tailoring establishment. He is aware that he is different, and in the homophobic society of the time, he could live freely as a gay man only in bohemian San Francisco. That is also where his sister Klara makes her way to build her career as a magician and acrobat.

Much against his mother’s wishes, he becomes a ballet dancer, promiscuous and flamboyant, till he dies of AIDS, which was just rearing its head then, and baffling the medical community that saw hundred of young men die painful and mostly lonely deaths. Simon dies on the day the psychic had predicted he would, but had he lived dangerously because of her revelation?

Klara meets an old friend Raj Chapal (an Indian connection from Dharavi, no less), who starts managing her career, and leads her to possible stardom in splashy Las Vegas. She marries him and has a daughter, but she performs dangerous feats and drowns her inexplicable despair in alcohol, pushing herself to die on the date predicted for her.

Daniel works as a military doctor, and is determined to find out why his younger siblings died; when he is suspended from his job, he gets obsessed with tracing the gypsy woman and finding out if she had indirectly been the cause of their demise. The oldest Varya, a scientist, researching longevity, knows she will  survive to ripe old age, but she also has to make those years meaningful.

Except for a section towards the end, The Immortalists, with its meticulous period research is an absorbing read. Benjamin writes with sympathy about the blighted existence of the Golds, tarnished by foreknowledge; even though their deaths were preordained, she makes each story exciting in its own way. The book seems to say that nobody can fight fate, but what if destiny’s dice were loaded unfairly?

The Immortalists

By Chloe Benjamin

Publisher: Penguin Random

Pages: 416