‘The Immortalists’ by Chloe Benjamin

Today I took a walk downtown and spent over an hour reading The Immortalists at the Toronto Public Library. The Immortalists ’s a beautiful book with Night Circus-type paper cutout illustrations on the cover that immediately caught my eye. The writing is absolutely gorgeous, too — there’s a part about the seventeen-year hibernation of cicadas and how they shed their shells, pale and not yet hardened, to sing to the night sky. I flipped back to that part after finishing the book because it was such a thought-provoking perspective on the book’s themes of life and living.

What does it mean to live a good life? Cicadas hibernate for seventeen years before emerging for a short, brief season; the Gold siblings seem to each experiment with the balance between safe hibernation and brilliant emergence. Varya hibernates and hides from life until Luke breaks his way into her life and causes her to reconfigure the way she’d been living. Daniel struggles between ethics and familial ties, and life, as it is lived, seems to always fall short. Kayla lives a life she dreamt of and worked for, albeit differently than she had imagined, but her desire to soul-search ends in her own death. And Simon, the youngest of the Golds, lives a short, brightly sparking life that, while short, colors the rest of his siblings’ lives. Each of their hibernations differ; each of their lives is bumped and shifted around by the successive deaths of their siblings.

Death, then, is just as important as life: not in that death drives us to live, necessarily, but the knowledge — or belief — of death creates the counterpart of life. In Immortalists, the strange knowledge of the date of their death gives each of the Gold siblings immortality: up to that date, they are untouchable by death. At the same time, the knowledge of their death looms over their entire lives: Simon moves to San Francisco and lives outside of his comfort zone because he knows he’ll die young, for instance. Does this knowledge affect their choices and lead them down a certain path? Or does such knowledge actually change anything: do we even have any control over our lives?

A small, round fly dive-bombed my hand multiple times as I was reading. I stalked it stealthily, tracking it and raising my palm slowly. Just as I was about to strike down, I paused. What control do we have over life? What a question. We have the control that we choose to take. Cicadas may seem to hibernate and bloom, but hibernating is part of life, as is blooming. What meaningful distinctions are there between life and what we choose to classify as death, hibernation, not-life? As I brought my palm down, the fly escaped, leaving a sharp red sting on the back of my hand.