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.
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Monday, April 3, 2023 at 7:12AM 
