The Immortalists

Benjamin, Chloe. The Immortalists. New York: Putnam 2018. Print

First Sentences:

Varya is thirteen ....

They wind through the neighborhood, all four of them: Varya, the eldest; Daniel, eleven; Klara, nine; and Simon, seven. 

Description:

What if you had the opportunity to know the exact date of your own death? Would you want to find out that information? Would knowing this date change your life in any way? In Chloe Benjamin's novel The Immortalists, the four young siblings in the Gold family decide to obtain this information for themselves. They meet with a gypsy woman and are each secretly told the dates of their deaths. Some of the children share this information about when they will die with their brothers and sisters, while one only says he will die "Young."

What follows in this brilliantly-written novel are separate chronologies for the lives of Varya, Daniel, Klara, and Simon Gold. Broken into four sections, the book tells four individual narratives, each focusing on one sibling, stretching from their late teens years on into adulthood. One child goes on to become a dancer, one a magician, one a doctor, and one a scientific researcher.

Readers become immersed into each of these lives, so I don't want to reveal more. But all the time as their stories unfold we readers cannot help wondering what an individual's death date is and what each character will do with this knowledge. Those dates are almost never referred to by the siblings, that is, until we finally learn that their day is upon them.

The tension between their everyday lives, loves, triumphs, and defeats is palpitating. While they have little interaction with each other in adulthood, there is a knowledge that each person, like themselves, knows a secret only they are privy to and must deal with that knowledge in their own way.

He heard the siren song of family -- how it pulls you despite all sense; how it forces you to discard your convictions, your righteous selfhood, in favor of profound dependence.

I couldn't stop turning pages, both because I was totally engrossed in their separate life stories and because I just had to know how each person addressed their secret. A truly fascinating plot, well-written, with characters one really cares about deeply. Highly recommended. 

And yet, and yet: Is it a story if you believe it?...On some days, she doesn't think it's absurd to believe that a thought can make something come true.

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Benjamin, Chloe. The Anatomy of Dreams.   

The headmaster at a boarding school introduces two students into his research into dreams and how, shaping their dreams, they can possibly control stress and tension. But there are developments that bring questions into all three lives and reality and dreams.

Everything I Never Told You

Ng, Celeste. Everything I Never Told You. New York: Penguin. 2014. Print.

First Sentences:

Lydia is dead. 

But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.

Description:

Grim, powerful first lines are exactly the kind that force you to continue reading. And Celeste Ng's novel Everything I Never Told You does not disappoint on any page. 

It is a sad story set in a small college town during the mid-1970s, a story of one family's tragic loss of their teenage daughter Lydia who they discover has drowned in a nearby lake. But why did this happen? Who caused her death? Could it have been avoided? And what does her loss do to each member of her family?

Underlying this simple tale are the swirling currents of race discrimination, alienation, parenting, loneliness, spoiled relationships, and individual coping strategies when dreams blossom and die. 

Lydia, along with her older brother Nath and younger sister Hannah, are children of James, a Chinese father who is a history professor at a small college, and Marilyn, who is white, a housewife, and once was James' student. Wracked by guilt and sadness over Lydia's death, all four family members look for answers from each other and outsiders like the police and Jack, the unsupervised trouble-making teen living across the street. 

Jack smelled as if he had just been out in the woods, leafy and green. He smelled the way velvet felt, something you wanted to run your hands over and then press to your face.

With chapters narrated by different characters, individual past histories including Lydia's are slowly uncovered. Each person is full of secrets and surprises that show these people to be a very ordinary family but made up of individuals who are unique in both good and troubled ways.

Marilyn smiled back, a fake smile, the same one she had given to her mother all those years. You lifted the corners of your mouth toward your ears. You kept your lips closed. It was amazing how no one could tell.

I won't spoil the details of the exploration of this family's inner workings and the unraveling of details around the death of Lydia. Suffice to say, it is not a thriller-style book about roving murderers and violence. Rather it is a riveting, highly personal novel of one family's interaction as a group and as individuals during their formative years in a difficult social environment. Their dreams, their losses, and their coping mechanisms for dealing with feelings of loneliness, frustration, and isolation are powerfully portrayed by Ng's spare writing, with plenty of secrets and twists up to the very last pages.

Before that she hadn't realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Ogawa, Yoko. The Housekeeper and the Professor

The very quiet, personal narrative of a Japanese woman who becomes the housekeeper for a retired professor of mathematics. Their relationship and gradual unfolding of their inner strengths and lives is satisfying on every level. (previously reviewed here)

See, Lisa. China Dolls

Story of three young Chinese girls during the 1938 World's Fair in San Francisco, trying to make a living, enjoy their new friends, and preserve their individual identities in this very foreign world. (previously reviewed here)

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir

McCracken, Elizabeth. An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir. New York: Littleton, Brown. 2008. Print

First Sentences:

Once upon a time, before I knew anything about the subject, a woman told me I should write a book about the lighter side of losing a child.

(This is not that book.)

Description:

Discovering a new author can lead you to topics well outside your usual preferences as you glom onto every book which that author has written. You follow serendipitous pathways from one subject to another just to keep reading the words of a quality writer. Subject matter, to me, is always secondary to writing style and characters. If an author you enjoy writes it, you will come (and read it). 

Such an experience is now happening to me with Elizabeth McCracken, my newest favorite writer. After being fascinated by her book, The Giant's House, I have been reading everything else she has written (Niagara Falls All Over Again; Thunderstruck; Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry). 

Now I have completed An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir, about a topic I probably would not have explored except that McCracken had written about it. The subject? The stillbirth death of her first child, along with the events leading to that day and the recovery she and her husband undergo, culminating with the successful birth of her second child one year later.

The title gave me no hint as to its subject, although the intricate, confusing linkage of these words was intriguing to me, an unsuspecting reader. As any great writer does, she provides information in her first sentences to separate the sheep from the goat readers who are uncertain whether to continue reading. She seems to say, "This book is about the death of my baby, so keep reading or move on." For me, I was all in based on these in-your-face initial sentences and McCracken's previous triumphs in books. 

She engagingly details the intimate and sometimes funny story of her early single years, her love for her husband, and their life in an ancient French farmhouse.  McCracken and her husband, both authors, are living in rural France during her pregnancy and the delivery. During her pregnancy, they refer to their expected child "Pudding," originally a joke but it sticks and actually becomes the name they choose for the death certificate and coffin. McCracken's writes openly about her normal pregnancy full of joy, expectations, worries and hopes common to expectant parents ... right up to the moment when she learns her child is dead inside her, and she "stepped over the border from happy pregnancy to grief."

During an examination shortly before her due date, no heart beat could be heard inside the womb. Her thoughts at that moment are numbing, especially when she realizes she will still have to go through the delivery, knowing the result will be a dead baby. I cannot relate to you the kind of sadness she describes so clearly, so honestly, and so achingly final.

The memoir jumps back and forth between her life before, during, and after Pudding's death, including her second successful pregnancy. Because she foreshadows the stillborn delivery in the first sentences, she has no need to hide that event which permeates every memory. McCracken writes of incidents with her thoughts felt at those moments, as well as with the emotions she now has as she looks back with new irony and understanding. And such emotion she reveals to us:

The first thing we did back at Savary [their French farmhouse] was dismantle the future....Edward broke down the portable crib...I threw out all my maternity clothes...tossed out stuffed hippopotamus and any other toylike object....but not the baby clothes.

Who can separate practicality from hope from lingering superstition? We wanted another child. We wanted to fill those clothes.  

The anticipated autopsy report provides a new concern for McCracken. 

All summer long we'd waited for the autopsy results. I wanted to read them and I didn't want to read them. I was terrified that the verdict would say, essentially, Cause of death: maternal oblivion.... [The conclusion actually was] chorioamniotitis, with no known histological cause.

The book also provides an insightful look at the power words and actions have on someone who has experienced a calamity. Well-meaning people inquire about McCracken's baby and she finds explanations the hardest thing to do. She feels she needs a card similar to those passed out by deaf people asking for money.

When Pudding died, I wanted my stack [of cards]. My first child was stillborn, it would say on the front....I want people to know but I don't want to say it aloud. People don't like to hear it but I think they might not mind reading it on a card.... [I could give it to] every single person who noticed I was pregnant the second time, and said "Congratulations! It this your first?"

She notes that people can have a positive impact as well. As a cancer survivor I found I could identify with the power friends and family can have during one's struggle to deal with unexpected and overpoweringly sad circumstances.

Before Pudding died, I'd thought condolence notes were simply small bits of old-fashioned etiquette, important but universally acknowledged as inadequate gestures. Now they felt like oxygen, and only now do I fully understand why: to know that other people were sad made Pudding more real.

There is some unexpected humor as well. After hearing of the dead baby inside her, she is asked by a nurse, in French, whether they want "une nonne" (a nun). Her husband hears "Un nain" (a dwarf), so they later laugh at the concept that French hospitals have "Dwarfs of Grief" to comfort those who suffer a tragedy.

So how does a reader like me who enjoys Lee Child bloody thrillers, memoirs about prisons, humorous crime capers, sports histories, space exploration, and Tolkien get helplessly mixed up with a memoir of such sadness as the loss of a child? It's simple. McCracken is a highly skilled writer who can really tell a story with feeling and honesty, with personality and even self-deprecating humor. An Exact Replica has all my elements for a quality read: great writing, interesting characters, and a compelling story. I was led to this book because I simply wanted to read more by McCracken, but then found myself thoroughly engrossed and even able to relate to her descriptions of a world of hospitals, people, and sorrow.

McCracken recalls a sentence that keeps going through her mind: "This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending." I think these words perfectly describe this book. This memoir is not simply a terrible tragedy; it is story of a happy, normal woman encountering a harsh reality, painstakingly recording her thoughts, and then trying to move forward. You cannot simply "read" this book impassively; you are totally absorbed into her mind and actions, experiencing along side her every hope and trial. It is a powerful read about tragedy and hope.


Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

McCracken, Elizabeth. The Giant's House: A Romance

A fiercely independent, crotchety librarian takes a special interest in a young boy who is remarkably curious about information, books, and discussions. And he is a giant, growing to over 8' tall by age 18. (previously reviewed here)

Hitchens, Christopher. Mortality.

One man's personal thoughts on his battle with cancer. Very compelling reading to help readers understand what someone with this disease is feeling regarding his illness, how friends interact with him, care from his doctors, and his plans.

Diamond, John. Because Cowards Get Cancer Too: A Hypochondriac Confronts His Nemesis.

Thoughtful, personal, and humorous account of John Diamond's long struggle with cancer as originally told through his column in the Times of London. Highly recommended along with the Hitchens' book for anyone who wants to know what having cancer is like. His words ring true to me as a fellow cancer patient. (previously reviewed here)

Halpern, Susan. The Etiquette of Illness: What to Say When You Can't Find the Words.

Excellent suggestions and practical applications for talking (or not talking) to people with illness: how to say what you want without causing offense or embarrassment, what they want you to say, when to just remain silent. Very valuable examples and advice for well-intentioned friends and family of patients of all ages and illnesses.