6/26/2023 0 Comments The immortalists chloe benjamin![]() ![]() Simon, the youngest, is the first to go at 20, dying of AIDS in 1982 after a few uninhibited years as a gay man in the Castro. (Indeed, “The Immortalists” TV rights have already been acquired by production studio the Jackal Group.) After the visit to the fortune-teller, the book breaks into four sections, each beginning with a sibling coping with another family member’s death and most ending with that sibling hurtling toward their own - in exactly the order and time the woman on Hester Street predicted. So much of the book’s plot follows from that portentous set-up by necessity that its progress can feel dutiful, almost programmatic. It’s a premise that carries the whiff of a thought experiment or a question on a personality quiz: Would you want to know the date of your death? In 1969, the four Gold siblings, Varya, Klara, Simon and Daniel, steal away to Hester Street in New York, where a fortune teller tells each of them the day they’ll die. ![]() But Chloe Benjamin’s second novel, “The Immortalists,” imagines what happens when that truth moves from hazy inevitability to pressing reality. Death comes for us all, we know that - in theory. ![]()
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