"Immortals" is the second novel by the young American writer Chloe Benjamin. With such a name, it could well be some fantasy about mountain witchers, but in fact it is quite a realistic work "about life", in the center of which is a rather interesting question, the wording of which should begin with the phrase "if". If only you knew on what day you were destined to die?
How would you live, what would you do, would it affect your lifestyle, would this secret knowledge bring joy or sorrow? And in general, would you believe in this magic of numbers, or maybe you would ignore such a prediction and never remember?
The heoes of "Immortals" on the first pages appear before us as children: four children from a Jewish family of the owner of a small sewing factory in New York go to a fortune teller who, according to rumors, can predict the date of death. Next, we have four chapters (according to the number of heroes, of course), in each of which we observe the adult life of our heroes, and, alas, their death, to which they treat differently, as well as the prediction they once received.
"Immortelles" is not a masterpiece, not the kind of book for which it is worth throwing everything and sitting down in a cozy armchair, hiding behind a blanket. And this, no matter how stupid such a statement sounded, is its main drawback, because if you write books on this topic, with this plot, with this construction, then they should shake the reader's soul, blow up his brain, fill up with a bunch of questions and stay in memory for a long time, as a sample of high-quality intelligent prose.
And so, it seems, all the formalities have been observed, the topics have been disclosed, but none of the characters have become your family, you have not liked anything in the text so much that you want to tell friends and acquaintances about the novel. A little more than "one more", demonstrating the author's potential rather than using it to its full potential.
The main theme of "Immortals" is not eternal life at all, but simply life expectancy, which is considered to be more than average. Statistics are against the human perception of age, personal desires are against the benefits of all mankind. "Died young" - what time is it?
And at 16, and at 30, and at 45, we are too young for death, because we must first get tired of life, get fed up with it, give the go-ahead to leave this world with a minimum of regrets. But some are burning, others are smouldering. There are people who seem to be in a hurry to live, to rush to try everything, to experience, to know, to go everywhere and see everything, they live "full life" or "indulge in hedonism" - this is just an assessment from the outside, and an assessment not devoid of envy of the evaluator. And there are others, dragging, pulling the strap, postponing it for later, as if an eternity has spread out before them, to which they are doomed.
But what about the third, those who have everything in their own time, who will give birth to their first child before thirty, will quit smoking at forty, at fifty will change nervous work to something simpler in order to be at home more? And after all, there are fourth and fifth, you can find sixth and seventh, whose relationship with time, life and death will differ sharply from the listed options. It's even strange that in the end everyone is waiting for the same thing...
The main author's task of Chloe Benjamin is to make her reader stop reading, raise his head and think about how he himself lives, what his life consists of and how long he expects it to last.
Is life important to him for the sake of life, is the length of the segment that will be mentally marked on his tombstone between two dates important? She quite openly expresses her opinion on this issue within the framework of the novel system of characters: "a lucky ticket", the only long straw went to that representative of the Gold family who lives like laboratory animals, and feels exactly the same way, as if he puts an experiment on survival on him, providing years in return for a series of losses and hardships experienced.
Regarding the need for knowledge about his own death, the author also speaks very bluntly, demonstrating the aggravation of the situation the more the date of the expected end of life is closer. Does it not contribute to our activity, regardless of what we do, the fact that in our consciousness death is always somewhere far away, somewhere not here and not now? Doesn't it seem pointless to have any chatter when you know for sure that tomorrow you will be gone?
Unlike Chloe Benjamin's attitude to a long life, another question related not to the premise, but to the plot, will remain open. Everyone knows that a person is a suggestible being, that he is looking for confirmation of his patterns, but sometimes it is extremely difficult to determine where the cause is and where the effect is, or what exactly led to the result.
Knowing the point of no return, will we prepare ourselves for it, will we keep the knowledge of it in mind when making this or that decision, or is it because of our decisions that we bring ourselves to this point, draw it instead of a pencil with a permanent marker, translate it from prediction into reality? Alexander Panchin and his "Defense against the Dark Arts. A guide to the world of paranormal phenomena" say one thing, but it can be assumed that something else is important for the heroes of the Immortals, but the reader is free to decide for himself.
The novel is easy to read, in fact it is four stories with a common set of characters and on one topic under a single cover, but there are some things in it that put me in a slight stupor. Well, I don't like it when the author is exhausted and begins to shove some unusual things into his text for the sake of a greater degree of surprise of the reader, about which you can only say something like "this happens only in a movie / in a book".
Here, too, the plotlines that pop up out of nowhere in the spirit of "Luke, I'm your father", "I've always loved her, but secretly, so that's what I did" and "this is the FBI, no one moves" somewhat spoiled my enjoyment of the book. In general, I need to declare stories about lost and found children a black mark for a work of art.
426.476 SRY