About the Book
When Adela discovers she has a terminal illness, her thoughts turn to Tereza, the child she gave up at birth.
Leaving behind her family in their native Czech village, Adela flies to the United States to find her long-lost daughter before it is too late. Raised in America and living in a fractured New York City, Tereza is working for two suspicious biotech moguls hellbent on immortality.
But before Tereza can imagine a cure for Adela, her mother dies and her body disappears. Narrated by Adela’s restless spirit, the novel blends an immigrant mother’s heart-breaking journey through Reagan’s American dream with her children’s quest to reclaim her in the near future.
Format: eARC (320 pages) Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Publication date: 28th March 2023 Genre: Science Fiction
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My Review
I described the author’s first novel, Spaceman of Bohemia, as part space adventure, part chronicle of recent Czech history. It also featured an encounter with a strange companion prompting the protagonist to revisit the events of his early life. Apart from the space adventure bit, you can tick off all the rest with this latest book – a magical talking carp anyone? – but add a large helping of dystopia.
In the author’s frighteningly plausible scenario, America in 2030 is a country where surveillence of citizens is omnipresent and the boundary between the human brain and AI technology is increasingly thin. Many have adopted an implant that connects the Internet directly into their brain. Commerce is dominated by biotech giants such as the VITA corporation, an entity run by two individuals called Steve and Mark. (Random choice of first names? I don’t think so… ) They are investing billions into research on increasing human longevity. Adela’s daughter, Tereza, is one of their employees although her research has a much more altruistic motivation. And America is now governed by the Reclamation Party, a far right, ultra-nationalistic government whose first piece of legislation closed the country’s borders to immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, and requires those few visitors who do make it to their shores to be electronically tagged and tracked. Unlikely, surely? Climate change has also caused rising sea levels, rendering parts of America uninhabitable.
After only one day with her long-lost daughter, who was adopted by a Danish family as a newborn, Adela dies but lives on in a virtual state able to witness the attempts of her daughter to retrieve her body which has mysteriously disappeared, possibly for ominous reasons. Travelling back to Czechia, Tereza meets her 109-year-old grandmother, the wonderful Babi, and her brother, Roman. He has become infected with the same nationalistic attitudes as those in America.
Between observing their efforts and browsing through the entries in Tereza’s online journal via her implanted device, Adela makes virtual trips back in time to ‘the adventures of her youth’. These include her experiences as a dissident in 1980s Czechoslovakia, as an undocumented immigrant to America and as the wife of a budding filmmaker. We witness their ill-fated attempt to make a film based on the science fiction novel, War of the Newts by Czech author, Karel Čapek, which features an interspecies relationship. (If Wikipedia is to be believed, the author and his novel actually exist.) The latter section felt overlong to me although it did prompt me to search for information about salamanders.
I admired Adela’s resilience. As she herself reflects, ‘I had lived well, loved well, betrayed well, failed well. In all my triumphs and in all my faults, no one – not a cosmic force, not a god, not my children saving my remnants – could ever accuse me of letting life pass me by, of capitulating, of giving in once I’d been broken’. However I did find her willingness to jettison relationships questionably selfish. ‘In each person’s life, there came a time to cut losses and run’.
A wry humour runs throughout the book that often satirises potential technological developments. I chuckled (and so, I suspect, did the author) at the idea of a publishing house promising ‘to revolutionise the field of literature’ by creating custom books for each reader based on a detailed questionnaire which would enable them to identify a reader’s preferences, such as favourite genres, views about politics and identity, their capacity for empathy, favourite foods and music, etc.
A Brief History of Living Forever is endlessly inventive, occasionally bizarre but never less than entertaining. The author’s vision of a dystopian world dominated by extreme nationalism is scary not least because it seems like it could be a possibility.
I received an advance review copy courtesy of Hodder & Stoughton via NetGalley.
In three words: Inventive, quirky, thought-provoking
About the Author
Jaroslav Kalfař, born in the Czech Republic, immigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen. He is the author of the critically acclaimed debut Spaceman of Behomia, a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award that was translated into fifteen languages and is being made into a major motion picture starring Adam Sandler and twotime Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan. Kalfar holds an MFA from New York University and lives in Brooklyn. (Photo: Goodreads author page)
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