Eternal Life: A Novel

by Dara Horn

Overview

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2018, Booklist Editors’ Choice Book (January 2019), and Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2018

What would it really mean to live forever?

Rachel’s current troubles—a middle-aged son mining digital currency in her basement, a scientist granddaughter trying to peek into her genes—are only the latest in a litany spanning dozens of countries, scores of marriages, hundreds of children, and 2,000 years, going back to Roman-occupied Jerusalem. Only one person shares her immortality: an illicit lover who pursues her through the ages. But when her children develop technologies that could change her fate, Rachel must find a way out. From ancient religion to the scientific frontier, Dara Horn pits our efforts to make life last against the deeper challenge of making life worth living.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393356564
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/08/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	239,270
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Dara Horn is the author of five novels and was one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. She has taught Jewish literature at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence College, and Yeshiva University. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

Editorial Reviews

"An elegant musing on sacredness, history and purpose that is, at the same time, a deliciously romantic, highly suspenseful page-turner."

Geraldine Brooks

"As a philosophical novel, Eternal Life asks the most fundamental of questions: What makes life meaningful? Is its traditional arc, from birth through family formation to death, necessary? Is it a blessing that we insufficiently appreciate?"

Forward - Julia M. Klein

"Horn does not hedge her bets, whipping up a Jewish telenovela of ancient-world drama and present-day complications. It’ll put you off immortality for good."

Newsday - Marion Winik

"Passionate, playful, and poignant."

Parade

"To an extent, it’s the humor (and horror) of infinite diaper changes that drives this masterful page-turner. However, Eternal Life is at its core a serious meditation on the meaning of life and purpose of death."

Times of Israel - Renee Ghert-Zand

"Rachel speaks with the wisdom of the ancients when she observes that immortality offers no consolation for the death of others. ‘Not dying doesn’t make it better,’ she says of all that sorrow. ‘It only makes it take longer.’"

Wall Street Journal - Sam Sachs

"I have been in love with Horn’s work since her first gorgeous novel, In the Image.… [Eternal Life] shimmers with Horn’s signature blend of tragedy and spirituality."

Washington Post - Ron Charles

"Riveting, startling, hilarious, and sad—I’ve never read anything like it."

Elif Batuman

"A mature, wry, uniquely female take on the problem of immortality."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Chelsea Leu

"The chilling pathos of Dara Horn’s Eternal Life is bound to turn every mortal reader into a philosopher of cosmic joy."

Cynthia Ozick

10/30/2017
At the heart of Horn’s funny and compassionate novel is a 2,000-year-old Jewish mother seeking reasons for living, some way of dying, and help for her 56-year-old son who lives in her basement. Rachel’s story begins in Roman-occupied Jerusalem, where at 16 she marries her father’s apprentice although she loves the high priest’s son, Elazar, and is pregnant with Elazar’s baby. Two years later, when the child falls ill, Rachel makes a bargain with God: she must give up not her life but her death in exchange for the child’s survival. The child survives, and Rachel endures successive lifetimes over the next 20 centuries, each lifetime immediately following the previous. Elazar, having made a similar bargain, pursues Rachel through time, occasionally finding her, though never for long. Now in 21st-century New York, Rachel’s current form (or “version,” as she calls it) is an 84-year-old widow. She thinks she has found a way to finally die, but first she wants to see her current problem child, the one in the basement, get a life. She also wishes to protect her granddaughter, a medical researcher dangerously close to discovering the truth behind Rachel’s unusual DNA. Horn (A Guide for the Perplexed) weaves historical detail and down-to-earth humor into this charming Jewish Groundhog Day spanning two millennia. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 11/15/2017
Living forever is nearly everyone's fantasy, but this fresh and arresting new work from Horn (A Guide for the Perplexed) proves that it's not really what you'd want. In Roman-occupied Jerusalem, Rachel makes a spiritual bargain to spare the life of her young son, joined by his father, a priest who is not Rachel's husband. Since then, she's had dozens of marriages and hundreds of children, and we first meet her as matriarch of a contemporary American family. Rachel, a successful businesswoman, is disappointed in latest son Rocky and wary because granddaughter Hannah has won a grant to study antiaging processes, which Rachel fears will lead to her next momentous departure. Time and again, she must enter a new life, the price of saving her first son being that she's always abandoning the beloved children that followed. Meanwhile, charismatic but dangerous Elazar, frighteningly in love with her, tracks her through time as both protector and tormentor. In this brilliant take on the burdens of immortality, the protagonist is not so much bearing witness to the ages, as typically seen in such stories, but bearing huge personal costs Horn makes us feel acutely. VERDICT Both heady time travel and a thoughtful meditation on the meaning of life; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 8/14/17.]—Barbara Hoffert,Library Journal

Library Journal