A Brief History of Living Forever by Jaroslav Kalfař

Published by ‎ Little, Brown and Company on March 28, 2023

Much of A Brief History of Living Forever is narrated by a dead woman. So much for living forever, although death is not the abyss that the narrator expected and desired. While I’m not a fan of the dead serving as characters, Jaroslav Kalfař makes the device work by supplying a non-supernatural explanation for the survival of the character’s consciousness.

The story is set in the near future. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a white nationalist, isolationist political party took control of American government. The new rulers are more interested in stoking online conspiracies than in governing. They focus on oppressing people who are not white nationalists while ignoring structural decay. The nation has closed its borders, although tourist visas are available to white Europeans, provided the tourists wear tracking devices so their location can be monitored. Most of Florida, having been destroyed by tsunamis, is populated by survivalists.

The Czech Republic briefly became a haven for refugees around the world, including Americans who fear civil war and climate destruction. The country’s openness gives birth to a countervailing nationalist movement that emulates America’s, prompting non-Czech residents to flee as refugees from the tattered country.

Adéla Slavíková lives in the Czech Republic, although her backstory as a dissident took her to the United States in 1982 on a forged passport. In 2029, at about the time she loses her job as a supermarket cashier to automation, she learns that she has less than a year to live. She resolves to make good on her promise to meet her daughter Tereza before she finishes “the final winter of my mortal toil.” Although Tereza was conceived in the US, Adéla returned to the Czech Republic and surrendered her to a Danish-American couple for adoption as soon as she was born.

Tereza now lives in the US and works as a bioengineer for VITA. She researches methods of life extension that include a “God pill” to prolong life indefinitely. Before she joined VITA, she debated the merits of uploading consciousness to the cloud, freeing the mind from a body that is “nothing more than a disgusting, malfunctioning sack of raw fluids, always broken, always sick, tiresome with its needs to be fed, to expel, beholden to primitive stimuli, to pleasures and joys whose allure was bound to limit the potential of our species.” Tereza believes the opposite to be true. Without a body, life cannot be experienced. To lose physical sensation is to lose the distinction between being a human and a simulation. She has chosen to concentrate her research on telomeres to find ways to prevent or delay death.

Adéla, on the other hand, wonders “what kind of maniac would want to live forever.” The novel makes clear that she has a point. Adéla only hopes to live long enough to meet, even briefly, with her daughter.

After Adéla and Tereza reunite, Tereza makes a deal with the devil (in the form of VITA), essentially signing over control of her life to her employer for the chance to use the company’s technology to save her mother’s life. When her mother disappears, presumably disposed of by the government after her death as a non-citizen, Tereza embarks on a mission to find her body. She meets her half-brother in the Czech Republic and they travel to the remnants of Florida, where Tereza learns VITA’s true plan for her mother.

The guts of the novel are found in the backstories of the mother and daughter. Adéla’s is the more eventful life. She resists her father’s plan to marry her to the village priest, gets in trouble for working on an “illegal literary review,” is torn apart by the editor’s decision to betray their cause for “the religion of self-interest,” is smuggled to the US, falls in love with Michael despite her best intentions, helps him make a movie, conceives Tereza, runs away to the Czech Republic in search of simpler times before realizing that no times are simple, gives up her baby and eventually makes another one in a failed relationship. It is a fascinating life, although the sketch I’ve provided gives no sense of the rich details and poignant moments from which Kalfař shapes Adéla’s essence. As Adéla observes, her story (like America’s) is one of “endless beginnings.”

A significant part of Adéla’s story revolves around Michael’s movie about an unnatural friendship between human and salamanders, a story that takes place prior to the beginning of Karel Čapek’s classic War with the Newts. As Michael’s movie ends, salamanders from one sea oppress salamanders from a different sea — their hatred of humans as a race narrowing to a hatred of their own kind based on the smallest of differences.

Michael’s movie is a response to rising nationalism as is, in many ways, A Brief History of Living Forever. Adéla recognizes that America, like other countries that persist in playing at empire, is the “victim to every one of its carefully crafted  stories and delusions.” Those delusions allow nationalists to crow about American exceptionalism, as if other countries and other people are not equally exceptional.

The point of the novel, like Michael’s movie, is that the capacity to care about people who are not like us is what makes a human truly exceptional. Yet nationalism is not a uniquely American problem. Kalfař illustrates that point near the novel's end, when a false flag planted by Czech nationalists causes armed extremists to flood into the home village of Adéla’s 109-year-old mother in search of fictional Islamic terrorists. European nationalism leads to the same desire to oppress as its American counterpart.

Tereza tells her brother that most nationalists are drawn to the movement because their lives are boring and meaningless. They find their self-worth in loyalty to a tribe, “adherence to tradition,” and “rejection of anything outside so-called patriotism.” Perversely, they “call such a life ‘freedom’.” They want to “feel like a paladin, protecting whatever it is you consider pure. There’s no war to fight, so you start one, because believing you’re a soldier is easier than accepting that life is mundane and ordinary and mad, a series of chores.” The world is filled with “young men claiming they struggle to feel purpose” while avoiding purposeful work that would help their fellow humans. Volunteering to “pour soup in a shelter isn’t nearly as sexy as starting a race war.” Nailed it.

Perhaps I am making the novel sound preachy, but Kalfař never sacrifices good storytelling for the sake of delivering political insights. I was touched by Adéla’s appreciation of the efforts her children make to recover her body, “to gift me a final act of dignity.” I admired Tereza’s evolution as a character, the development of her empathy, her understanding that failure is “the most natural thing in the world” and her bewilderment that people “worshipped the statistical minority” who succeed (often through luck) while despising those who chase their dreams and fail, “which was the far likelier version of life, the truth unembellished.” And I appreciated the steadiness of Adéla’s conviction that death is not defeat.

Kalfař seems to be following in Karel Čapek’s footsteps as a writer who mines the possibilities of science fiction to expose the ugly realities of human behavior. From characterization to meaningful messages, from an engaging plot to graceful prose, A Brief History of Living Forever is a truly impressive novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Rose/House by Arkady Martine

Published by Subterranean Press on March 30, 2023

Rose/House is a science fiction horror story. Fortunately, it’s not the common version of science fiction horror that imagines alien lizard people laying eggs in humans or mad scientists releasing zombie viruses. The horror in this story is a haunted house — haunted by an Artificial Intelligence with a twisted sense of purpose.

The architect Basit Deniau is dead. His remains, compressed into the form of a diamond, are archived with all his architectural plans in Rose House, a building he designed. He also created the AI that controls and guards Rose House. The AI is inseparable from the house, a thinking, non-human creature “infused in every load-bearing beam and fine marble tile.”

Basit has been dead for a year and the house has been sealed since his death. The only person allowed entrance is Deniau’s former student, Dr. Selene Gisel. She is allowed to visit for seven days each year, to inspect Deniau’s drawings and notes, admire his art collection, although the terms of Deniau’s Will do not allow her to remove anything or take pictures. Envious architects and groupies would love to have similar or greater access. Selene regards her special status as a curse.

The AI has a duty to report any death on the premises. It reports a death to the China Lake police but won’t open the door so they can identify the corpse. Detective Maritza Smith summons Gisil to let her into the house. It takes a bit of shallow trickery to get Maritza inside with Gisil. The house plays along with the trickery to suit its own ends, a fact that Maritza realizes too late.

Maritza’s partner, Detective Oliver Torres, doesn’t want to enter a haunted house and doesn’t try to accompany Gisel. He investigates on his own and returns when he learns that another architect has a plan to enter Rose House for a purpose that might be nefarious or benign, depending on your point of view. Torres is accompanied on his return visit by Alanna Ott, who might or might not be a journalist. While Torres is gone, Maritza has spooky adventures inside the house with Selene and the corpse, whose mouth she finds stuffed with fresh rose petals.

Rose/House tells a creative story. At least, the concept of a haunted AI house that is worshipped by architectural groupies is creative. Having established that background, Arkady Martine seemed to search for a plot that would do it justice. Martine came up with a standard story of a character who runs around in fear as the house threatens her while her partner investigates leads that add little to the plot. The explanation for the dead guy with the rose-filled mouth and the subplot involving the character who wants to break into the house is muddled. As a novella-length work, Rose/House supplies the reader with sufficient creepiness to earn a recommendation, but the story lacks the kind of characterization or meaningful threats that provide the chill a successful horror story should induce.

RECOMMENDED

A Flaw in the Design by Nathan Oates

Published by Random House on March 21, 2023

Some of the most intriguing crime novels are built on ambiguity. Who is the criminal? Was there even a crime? Is a seemingly villainous character the innocent victim of a false accusation? Is the accuser mistaken or malicious? Ambiguity is a page-turning force in A Flaw in the Design.

Matthew Westfallen became an orphan at 17 when his wealthy parents died in a hit-and-run accident. Their will nominated Gil and Molly Duggan to be Matthew’s guardian. Matthew’s mother, Sharon, was Gil’s sister. Gil and Molly already have two kids, Ingrid and Chloe.

Sharon married into money and, in Gil’s view, became a “vacuous shell” of her former self. Gil does not understand why she would give up the mediocre income of academia to live a “life among unctuous braggarts.” Sharon always wanted money and Gil always looked down on people who had it.

Gil and Molly haven’t had contact with Matthew’s parents in many years. Gil is less than pleased to have Matthew move from his Manhattan residence to the Duggans’ Vermont home. Six years earlier, when Matthew was a troubled child, he threw Ingrid into a swimming pool, nearly causing her to drown. Or at least that’s what Gil believes. He told Ingrid to stay away from the pool, fell asleep on a lounge chair, and was awakened by the splash. Matthew’s parents refused to believe that Matthew did anything wrong. Ingrid had no reason to lie and Matthew admitted he threw her into the pool, but his confession was sufficiently sarcastic that its accuracy was ambiguous. In Gil’s view, Matthew is a force of evil, the kind of kid who is looked upon with suspicion when the cat disappears.

Gil is a one-book writer who earns a modest living as a professor at a small college. While Gil and Molly are worried about living with Matthew, they’re also happy to have the monthly $10,000 payment that Matthew’s parents provided as a gratuity for their efforts. Matthew has his own money in a trust that comes with a generous allowance, so Gil is free to use the money to pay down the family’s debt. Declining the guardianship would cause the family to lose a welcome windfall.

Gil’s reservations seem to be misplaced. When Matthew arrives, he’s polite, engaging, quite the opposite of the arrogant brat they expected, although Gil believes that snarky judgment accompanies Matthew’s “cool New York irony.” Chloe is about Gil’s age and views him as an exciting and generous companion. At the same time, Matthew doesn’t seem to be grieving the loss of his parents. Of course, “orphan goes to live with parents and turns out to be nice” wouldn’t be much of a story, so later events give the reader (and Gil) new reasons to question Matthew’s character.

Matthew gets an advanced placement at the college where Gil teaches. He takes Gil’s fiction writing class and writes a story that suggests ways that children might die, including death by drowning. Gil is convinced that Matthew is writing about Gil’s daughters. Gil understandably loses his mind, perhaps literally. Bad things are going to happen, but will they happen to Matthew, Gil, or one of Gil’s daughters?

A Flaw in the Design is a sneaky novel. For most of the story, Matthew seems to be a prototypical kid who was “born evil,” the kind of horror novel character who will burn down his parents’ house before graduating from high school. But no bad deeds are explicitly narrated, leaving room for doubt. Did he really throw Ingrid into the pool? Was he involved in his parents’ death? Did he get Chloe drunk at a party? Is he poisoning the minds of other students against Gil? Or are Gil’s suspicions the product of an increasingly addled mind?

Perhaps Matthew is taunting Gil, revealing truths about his actions in the stories he writes for Gil’s class. Or perhaps he’s just pulling Gil’s chain. Gil seems to be the only one who recognizes that Matthew is a monster, but Gil might not be entirely stable. He follows Gil for no apparent reason. He eavesdrops on Matthew’s telephone conversations. He bases accusations on skinny evidence. He frightens students by screaming at Matthew in class. In his mind, his irrational behavior is justified. Is Matthew the bad guy or are his evil deeds a product of Gil’s imagination, compounded by Gil’s resentment of wealth? The ambiguity grows as the novel progresses.

Gil is developed in more depth than the other characters. We learn about his MFA years and failed writing career, his reactions to 9/11 and his parents’ death, his ambiguous suicide attempt, his hatred of New York and of horses (because they belong to the world of “the dilettante rich”), his love of Vermont. That character development makes it possible for a reader who will instinctively dislike Matthew to wonder if faith in Gil’s judgment is misplaced.

The story builds to a surprising ending. It is dramatic, but the drama is not overplayed. Ambiguity is not entirely resolved with evidence, but firmly planted clues will allow the reader to form conclusions about Matthew and Gil. That the reader will never know whether those conclusions are correct is a reflection of life. Nathan Oates’ reliance on ambiguity and characterization to build a clever story makes A Flaw in the Design a good choice for fans of cerebral crime fiction.

RECOMMENDED

Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on March 21, 2023

Wandering Souls is the story of a refugee family. It begins with a physical journey from Vietnam to England and ends as a life journey brings a refugee into late middle age.

Thi Ahn is one of the Vietnamese boat people who made it to Hong Kong. Her father’s plan was to divide the family, sending Ahn and her brothers Thanh and Minh first, followed by her parents, her two younger sisters, a baby brother and her brother Dao. Ahn’s boat arrives in Hong Kong after a brief encounter with Thai pirates who traffic in women. Her other family members drown when the boat that ferries them capsizes. Ahn learns their fate a few weeks after her arrival in Hong Kong when she is asked to identify their bodies. At sixteen, she becomes the guardian of her younger brothers.

While the story is primarily told from Ahn’s perspective, Dao occasionally chimes in with his concerns about Ahn and his other living siblings. Whether dead people should voice their thoughts as characters in a novel is, I suppose, a question of taste. I’m not a fan. I want dead people to keep their opinions to themselves, particularly their opinions of me which, I must assume, are unlikely to be favorable. Turning ghosts into characters makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s a personal problem, as chatty spirits are a common literary device.

My literary preferences notwithstanding, it makes sense in the context of the novel that Dao would comment from the afterlife on the observations he makes of his siblings. Dao is one of the wandering souls that give the book its title. I’m not sure it makes sense that his commentary would so often take the form of poetry, but who knows how ghosts communicate?

Dao's appearances contrast with American veterans of the Vietnam War who enter the story to express their remorse for setting up sound systems to disturb the souls of dead Vietnamese soldiers. Vietnamese cultural traditions/ superstitions teach that souls of the dead are condemned to wander until they have been buried in native soil. Disturbing their souls is meant as a form of psychological warfare. Dao is presumably wandering because his body washed up in Hong Kong, far from his homeland.

The understated story is largely free of drama, apart from the tragedy that turns Ahn and her brothers into orphaned refugees. Cecile Pin conveys Ahn’s fears but gives little attention to the atmosphere in the refugee camps in Hong Kong and England. Ahn has an uncle in New Haven but, not wanting to be around living relatives when much of her immediate family is dead, Ahn doesn’t mention him to the resettlement specialist. The US denies the family’s refugee application (likely because Ahn failed to mention her uncle) but England accepts them.

The story makes the point that each decision in a life opens a new timeline and forecloses others. Would the family have had a better life in America? The answer is unknowable. If her father had not sent the family to Hong Kong, would they all have survived in Vietnam? When Ahn flirts with guilt for abandoning her country, she is reminded that her family might have been sent to a forced labor camp if they had stayed. Each choice in a life opens a new door and closes countless others, but we never know what we would have discovered behind the doors we close.

Ahn’s siblings study English and, when Ahn turns eighteen, are granted Council housing in London. Ahn lives a life of sacrifice, taking a sewing job while her brothers attend school. One brother drops out at sixteen and begins to live a life that might be a bit shady. The other eventually makes a life of his own, although not the life he wants. Some choices are a function of opportunity and the opportunities we may desire are not always available.

Most of the story’s focus is on Ahn, whose life is narrated from the third-person. Ahn feels she has failed to raise her brothers properly, tarnishing her father’s dream that the boys would become doctors or scientists in America. Apart from letting us know what Ahn is thinking, Pin does little to give the reader a sense of the struggle that she endures. Or perhaps she isn’t struggling as she moves through the course of an average life (much of it lost to the reader in a flash forward), a life that begins in tragedy but becomes productive with the help of the Refugee Council.

The novel makes the case that helping refugees is essential. In a history lesson, we learn that Margaret Thatcher complained that giving council housing to the Vietnamese is unfair to white people. She thought Poles and Hungarians would assimilate more easily and feared that the Vietnamese would start riots. Thatcher carried on a British tradition of racism, a tradition that made British governments believe it was just fine to colonize and rule brown people around the world.

As the story nears its end, the perspective shifts to Ahn’s daughter Jane, who begins to narrate in the first person. Jane feels the weight of dead family members she never met, of human trafficking victims in Thailand of whom she has only read, of wandering souls in Vietnam during a war that ended before she was born. The reader assumes that Jane has likely been the narrator all along, a point of view that explains the sense of detachment from Ahn’s story.

The detachment is heightened by occasional pauses to teach history lessons: trafficking in Thailand, refugee statistics, Thatcher’s response to UN pressure to accept boat people into England. Pin adds academic discussions of the Iliad, transgenerational trauma, Joan Didion essays, and diverse cultural responses to death. Little of this resonates. The encounter with Thai pirates, for example, is so brief and uneventful that it creates no tension.

I sometimes had the impression that Pin was interested in showing off her breadth of knowledge, or perhaps in writing a novel that lit professors could use to illustrate various writing techniques, rather than telling an engaging story. The academic asides only enhance the feeling that we are glimpsing the story of a life that the narrator didn’t live. That narrative choice robs the story of the power it might otherwise have had.

Before the narrator’s final first-person intrusion into the story, the story wraps up with a brief return to the third-person point of view, perhaps a bit too predictably as the family contemplates their New Haven relatives and the need to give the wandering souls their rest. Trappings of a memoir round out the narrative.

Considered as a whole, Wandering Souls too often seems remote, depriving the reader of a strong connection to the characters or key events. The narrator’s detachment keeps the novel from being inspirational or truly moving, although — to be fair — not all difficult lives are inspirational or moving. At the same time, even an academic discussion of refugees in a time of crisis serves as an important reminder of lives less fortunate than those that most of us live. Simply calling attention to the boat people and the Vietnamese diaspora makes Wandering Souls worthwhile.

RECOMMENDED

Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 14, 2023

Antimatter Blues is a sequel to Mickey7. We learned in the first novel that a colony of humans is struggling to survive on a world that is inhabited by large worm-like creatures they refer to as creepers. In Antimatter Blues, the humans discover that the worms have relatives living a hundred kilometers to the south. The relatives resemble spiders, but that’s a product of design, as the worms and spiders are ancillaries that serve a leader. Both the worms and the spiders have trouble believing that the humans are not also ancillaries, much less that they traveled from another star.

Mickey7 is the seventh iteration of Mickey’s body. He joined the colony as an expendable, the guy who performs dangerous jobs that might end in death. Mickey7 died six times, each time uploading his memories before the mission so that his body could be dissolved and printed anew. Is each new Mickey a continuation of the original or a different person entirely? It seems like every recent sf novel I’ve read uses the Ship of Theseus as a metaphor, but it doesn’t work well here. New Mickeys are more like a new ship with the same captain (kind of like Kirk taking command of a new Enterprise every time he destroys the old one).

At the end of the last novel, Mickey made an agreement that he would no longer be an expendable. He enforced the agreement by making the false claim that the creepers had seized one of the colony’s nuclear bombs. Mickey also claimed that he was in communication with the creepers, an exaggeration that kept him alive. Now, thanks to a mishap, the colony needs the bomb and its fuel or it won’t survive the upcoming winter. Mickey is tasked with finding it. That should be an easy task except the bomb is no longer under the rock pile where he hid it.

To recover the bomb, Mickey must alternately enter into alliances with the worms and the spiders. Humans aren’t always good at alliances (even with other humans), as the worms and spiders both discover. The novel delivers entertaining action scenes as humans, who have superior technology but much smaller numbers, find themselves fighting with or against worms and spiders. Yes, there is a shout-out to the Spartans at Thermopylae, although the Spartans didn’t have the benefit of superior arrows.

The story is amusing, as Edward Ashton intends it to be. The action is fun. Mickey is a likeable character, as are his friends Berto and Cat and Mickey’s girlfriend Nasha. Each character has a distinct personality with all the depth they require for a story of this nature. The colony’s leader is a jerk, playing the role of a foil who contrasts with the decency of the likeable characters, but even jerks can be redeemed, at least in fiction. The novel’s modest attempts at poignancy are modestly successful.

Antimatter Blues works because it doesn’t overreach. It’s meant to be a comedic science fiction action story and, on that level, it reaches its goal. I would suggest reading Mickey7 before reading Antimatter Blues, but Ashton provides sufficient background to fill in readers who don’t want to bother with the first one.

RECOMMENDED