A family saga of amazing depth about the inevitability and freedom of choice, about the interweaving of illusion and reality, about the strength of family ties and the forces that break them.
The four stories are set against the backdrop of the 1980s and 90s. It all starts in 1969, in New York. On the Lower East Side, rumors spread about the appearance of a mysterious fortune teller who can predict the day of death. Four young Golds decide to find out their future destiny, and in the following decades, the prophecies begin to come true. Simon Gold will flee to San Francisco, where he will dive headlong into a bohemian life. Clara, after meeting the fortune-teller, every year will plunge deeper into dreams, wanting to overcome the line between fantasy and reality. Daniel will become a military doctor until that very fate intervenes. Varya will devote herself to studying the problem of immortality, balancing between science and fiction.
The novel was called «the perfect reading for fans of Donna Tartt and Celeste Ing.»
Chloe Benjamin is an American writer. Her first novel, Anatomy of Dreams (2014), won the Edna Ferber Prize. The second novel, Immortelles, was released in the United States in January 2018, but long before it was released, there was great interest in it — both from critics and readers. The novel has already been translated into 23 languages.
Press about the book:
Chloe Benjamin is only 28 years old, but her ambitious, deeply moving novel set the highest standard for fiction in 2018. The story begins with the fact that two brothers and two sisters learn from a fortune teller when they are about to die. But this is not an affair with a mystical line at all. The author is not interested in whether the fortune-teller was right or she is an ordinary fraud. She is interested in something else — the fate of this four, how they psychologically cope with the burden of such knowledge, how their childhood and a strange event shaped (or maybe deformed) their life path. This is a realistic and very deep novel about life and destiny.
Amazon Book Review
In the four of Golds, of course, there are echoes of another literary family — the Glasses from the stories of J.D. Salinger, some more, in fact, immortelles. They love each other, but they are separated by too many. Alienation and its overcoming — this is their fate, on which another matrix is superimposed — the Jewish one. A cozy world of Jewish traditions, symbols, cultural meanings, and next to a completely different world — Woodstock, free love, riots in Stonewall. In the air itself, the past and the future, fantasies and reality collide, and it is this conflictual breakdown of eras that determines fate.
National Public Radio
© 2018 by Chloe Benjamin
© Translation, edition in Russian, design.
LLC «Publishing House Phantom Press», 2018
Recorded by the Vimbo Production Center
© & ℗ LLC «Vimbo», 2018
Producers: Vadim Bukh, Mikhail Litvakov
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