The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

As is no doubt obvious from my less than stellar rating, I didn’t find as much to appreciate in Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists as some reviewers.  The author chose an interesting premise: four children go to a fortune teller who tells them the exact days on which they each will die.  The rest of the book is divided into four sections, one for each of the kids—Simon, Klara, Daniel, and Varya—that, with the exception of Varya, cover the span of their lives.  I did find the premise of the book enticing and kept going because I wanted to know what became of the characters.

One of my major complaints about the book—and one I noticed put off many readers to the extent that they dropped the book in its first section—was the very graphic homosexual sex scenes in Simon’s story.  Literary fiction is not erotica.  In my experience, readers of literary fiction do not want graphic sex scenes, be they heterosexual or homosexual, in their novels.  And before you go off and call me homophobic, I invite you to look on my blog, Lit in the Last Frontier, where you will discover that my number one novel of 2017 was The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne.  I understand that Chloe Benjamin was trying to show Simon’s tumultuous experience in 1970s and 80s San Francisco, but she needs to learn the value of the literary “fading to black” and letting the readers fill in the rest from their imaginations.  There are other places in the book where she inserts odd, needless sexual references.  In all of these cases the graphic portrayals neither further the plot of the novel nor flesh out its characters in a way that couldn’t be accomplished in a more literary fashion.

The other three sections cover the other characters, with each one being given a time frame: Klara from 1982-1991, Daniel from 1991-2006, and Varya from 2006-2010.  Unfortunately, this format doesn’t do the premise any favors.  Such large segments of Daniel’s and Varya’s lives are jumped over that the author has no opportunity to develop their characters, and, as a result, the things that both characters do seem very out of character for the people they were when we last spent any pages with them.

I found the plotting rather weak in places, making it easy to tell how the characters are going to die.  For instance Simon’s story—that of a gay young man who tells his siblings that the fortune teller told him he would die “young”—in early 1980s San Francisco, is pretty easy to predict.  To give Ms. Benjamin her due, where a crystal ball isn’t necessary to know where the plot arc is taking us, the emotion with which the stories are told carries the reader through.

This book almost got two stars from me for the above reasons.  However, Chloe Benjamin writes beautiful prose, worthy of the literary genre.  She just needs to perfect her intimate scenes to bring them more in line with what literary readers want from their novels.

I also felt that the separate, almost interconnected short story format didn’t work for the premise of the book.  The reader really needs the opportunity to see how the characters develop year by year as a result of knowing how their days are numbered.  Jumping large time segments robbed Ms. Benjamin and her readers of the opportunity to explore the entirety of her characters’ development.  A compellingly successful example of interlinked short stories comes from the book I read just, Hearts in Atlantis.  In this 800 plus page novel, Stephen King uses the same format but takes the time (and the pages) to flesh out his all of his characters.  Perhaps the 300 plus pages in which Ms. Benjamin tries to tell her story were simply not sufficient to the task.

Overall, this book is a solid three stars.  It has issues that I know some readers will find extremely off-putting.  For those who are either unbothered by the first section’s sex scenes or are willing to scan over them in order to get to the heart of the book, I think you will find, as I did, that the premise is interesting, the prose is lovely, and the characters engaging enough to keep you turning the pages.