Set in 2030 where authoritarianism has taken control, A Brief History of Living Forever asks some interesting questions. The answers, at times, are not as deep and thought out. The story as a whole, however, is fascinating and recommended.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for providing me an eARC of A Brief History of Living Forever in exchange for my honest review!

I have to admit that I feel conflicted coming out of this book. The characters compelled me enough, and I was certainly gripped by the story's dystopian setting, especially considering how all-too-plausible its presentation of xenophobia feels in this day and age (for context, I'm an American who's terrified by the increasingly regressive direction my country is heading in). On top of all that, it weaves in questions and doubts about the supposed gift of immortality and whether it's something we mortals should really be striving for. However, as engaging as the book was, there was never truly a point until the ending where I could completely connect with it, where it fully hit me on an emotional level. And that ending is great, but I wish I could have gotten more deeply invested in the narrative earlier on.

Overall, I'm officially rating A Brief History of Living Forever three out of five stars. I'm sad I didn't come out loving this, but who knows, maybe you'll have a better time with it than I did.

I was rather disappointed with this title since I loved "A Spaceman of Bohemia." I think Kalfar tries to do too much political treatise with too little character development. I felt myself lost in the dense, sometimes on the nose, political commentary. Don't get me wrong, I agree with many of the writer's opinions...It just didn't add to the story as well as it could.

The sci-fi story is told from the perspective of Adela, who dies not too far into the novel. Her narration continues into her afterlife and bounces between her present self (or lack thereof) observing her children, and her memories of early adulthood. The author has a lot to say about the threat of nationalism, and in my opinion he juuuust skirts the line between pointed and preachy (he ain't wrong though). I think he has perfected a subtler approach to the human condition--I especially liked the lack of redemption for certain characters. Some might call it pessimism; to me it feels real.
I was really moved by the story-winthin-a-story, the film Adela makes with Michael. It worked as an allegory for the issues Kaltar wants to confront, but didn't hit you over the head with it.
My only criticism is the transition between chapters felt repetitive Adela usually announces "oop time to go" when she returns to the past/present, which I didn't feel was necessary.
Overall, I quickly became invested in the story and that feeling increased as the plot developed. It surprised me, too; my expectations were constantly diverted up until the very end.

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

I love dystopians and the idea behind this book is what pulled me in! I also loved how you could almost ALMOST see this dystopian being real one day!

However, it was super descriptive and very slow at times. Luckily there was times of fast moving parts or I would have probably walked away.

It was very heartfelt and I did genuinely want to see the characters succeed! I just wanted more pace! More action!

A Brief History of Living Forever by Jaroslav Kalfar began by pulling me out of the world within the first chapter. It has a dystopian version of the US ruled by fascists caused by an unnamed politician from Florida who managed to gain control. This was too specific to keep me immersed in the story. I did continue reading and the remainder of the story stayed within its world. Because I struggled to care about the characters and the plot, it took me much longer to finish this novel than is usual for me. For this reason, it gets only 3 stars.

5 stars

This provocative, deeply intelligent, philosophical, and too-close-for-comfort near future dystopian novel grabs your attention from the get-go. The setting is America in 2030, in which an unnamed Senator from Florida embracing DeSanto’s MAGA views has been elected President and immediately implemented an authoritarian, anti-immigration philosophy. The story centers around a mother-daughter reunion between Adéla, who lives in her deteriorating small-town Czech family home and faces a terminal illness just want a chance to meet her daughter who gave her daughter up for adoption in America decades earlier, and wants to meet her American scientist daughter Tereza before dying.

In America, our country has implemented the Reclamation of America policy, scattering unwanted refuges out of the country as well as withdrawing from all international affairs in full-out isolationist politics. Hard to get short-term visas get issued only to white Europeans, such as Adéla.

American’s science community now focuses on extending the lives of privileged Americans. But in doing so, three factions have arisen at odds with each other. One faction believes that only pure biological advances count as life and have been derogatorily called the Meat Grinders by the others. Another faction wants to upload the human mind digitally, and they’re called The Digits as others see them wanting to reduce life to 1’s and 0’s, and only achieving simulated life. In between is a faction who wants to focus on tech enhancements to the body, or even cell repair nanobats, and they’re stuck with being called The Borgs (after a compelling Star Trek race that who’s bodies get fully tech enhanced as they’re absorbed into the Borg Collective.)

Tereza is a genius and leading researcher with an enormous lab financed by the VITA company. Tereza, whose adoptive parents have died, works round the clock to achieve advances in enhanced biology and drug therapies to extend life spans. She’s under tight NDA’s and passionate about her work, despite VITA’s increasing mistreatment of her human test subjects. She’s close to achieving what has been dubbed “The God Pill” it will go first as a luxury item to wealthy elites and be used as a bargaining chip to increase VITA’s endless quest for more power.

When Teresa meets Adela, they share one night of bonding during which Teresa decides to beg the two brothers who run VITA to allow her to give her Mom her life-saving drug discovery.

What follows is a dark, all-consuming thriller.

There are so many brilliant insights that I found myself highlighting sections on every other page, just so that I could go back and re-read them!

I cannot wait for more from this brilliant author!!

Thanks to Doubleday Books and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

"My name is Adéla Slavíková. Join me, on this usual path to work, during the final winter of my mortal toil!"

Is that not a perfect intro? We meet, as you can see, Adéla, at the start of the story. She's an older lady, living with her mom and son in the Czech Republic, in 2029. We meet her on one of the worst days of her life- she has just been given about a year left to live with a terminal illness. She decides she is going to go see the daughter she gave up for adoption many moons ago. Her daughter happens to live in the US (unsurprisingly, we are a hot mess and have destroyed the country), and it isn't easy to travel there. But she is determined to see Tereza before she dies.

Tereza has made quite a name for herself in the US, and one of her biggest projects is finding the key to immortality. Her company is willing to do just about anything to crack the code, and she hopes to be able to save her mom. But alas, Adéla dies just as they meet. But something... interesting has happened, and Adéla still has some sort of consciousness remaining. We switch between past and present, as Adéla shares details of her life leading up to finding Tereza, and what is happening with Tereza and her company now.

I absolutely loved the familial aspect of this story. Not only is Adéla worrying about her kids, she is worrying about how her aging mother (she's 109, how cool is that?) is coping. And, through the past snippets, we see how her relationship with her parents evolved over time. There are a ton of beautiful and heartwrenching moments throughout the story, and that has to be my favorite aspect. There are also a lot of great, thought provoking questions of morality and mortality. What makes us us? What makes us "alive"? And should we really ever play god?

There were some moments were I thought perhaps we had a bit too much detail about Adéla's past, especially the movie she made with her ex, that dragged for me a bit. But overall, I loved taking this beautiful, yet often bleak, journey with Adéla and her family.

Bottom Line: This book is a very heartfelt journey, but it also asks some really thought provoking and important questions.

Thank you netgalley for the review copy of a brief history of living forever. It's well written, compellingly so. Had I not just experienced tremendous loss in my own life I probably would like it more, but alas I have so I'm really not the person to give it a full wholehearted review. Our protagonist is told she is going to die soon and decides to go find the find the daughter she gave up in the Czech Republic. It's full of fascism and bleakness. True dystopia. It reads bleak with glimmers of true hope. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Delighted to include this title in the March edition of Novel Encounters, my regular column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction, for the Books section of Zoomer magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

I was very excited by the premise of A Brief History of Living Forever. Unfortunately, I struggled to get through the story. Adela has been given the news that she will soon die. When she heads to America to reconnect with Tereza the daughter she had given up for adoption, we are introduced to an America of the future where immigrants have no rights. Adela is the narrator and as she tells her story from being a teenager through to becoming a mother and the "new" now it is in a downhearted way. I enjoyed the present day of the story the most though the story is very quite unexpectedly political. .

Thank you NetGalley and Little Brown and Company for the advanced reader copy.

One of my most anticipated reads of the year because of how much I enjoyed Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia back in 2017. I’ve got mixed feelings about this one, though in the end they trend towards the positive.

It’s guilty of info dumping at the beginning, which turned me off a bit. I didn’t care for the narration, either—it gave me high school “in this essay I will” vibes. There were at least three explicit Lord of the Rings references which was unexpected because… why? But that’s nit picking, I suppose.

The plot was great. After the first bit of info dumping I was totally sucked in. I flew through the book so fast that I was surprised when it ended. And the characters were phenomenal as well. There’s so much depth in to all of them, because Kalfar really knows how to craft these emotional characters that are guaranteed to resonate with readers. He’s a truly gifted storyteller, even if the writing itself felt a bit off at times.

This would be an incredible book club pick because it’ll generate so many interesting discussions on several topics. In fact, I’d recommend a friend or group read-along because there’s so much more to get out of it beyond your own reading of the text.

This took me entirely too long to read, but it did feel like a very worthwhile read. Everything about the obok is captivating, it just went by a bit slower than anticipated based on the hook the premise had on me.

What would you do if you learned you only had a year left to live? Adela unfortunately learns this is what will happen to her and she makes the decision to go to the USA to find the daughter she gave up for adoption. What follows is an unexpected journey where Adela is able to learn about her daughter from her viewpoint in the afterlife. While her daughter, Tereza, has a journey that helps her to connect with a family she never knew.

This book is a complicated tale of a mixture between love and family along with futuristic technology aiming to extend that family bond. This sounded like it would be right up my alley and I was excited to read it. Also there are so many positive reviews. Unfortunately it wasn’t for me. I struggled to get into the story. I wonder if it was in audiobook form if I would like it better but I’m not sure. Still I always believe that a book is worth trying and hope others give it a try.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for the opportunity to review this arc.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the ARC copy!

The synopsis of this book immediately sounded right up my alley. I would recommend reading this if you like dual timelines of past Vs future, dystopian reads, and some medical drama. Overall the writing was great in this but I found myself wanting more from the plot and characters. 3.5 stars rounded to 4

Definitely an interesting and intriguing read. Science fiction of a read which is not usually my genre but I did enjoy it.

Thanks to Little, Brown and Company and Netgalley for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Anyway, this book was stunning. I hate to use the term "meditation" when talking about books, since it feels like such a cliche at this point, but it really was that in terms of how it looked at grief and memory and what it means to /live/ and connect with others.

The style of writing has a sparse lushness to it, and the shift between time periods feels like shifting in a dream. I was intending to give it four stars at first, but the ending pushed me to five: the book kept true to it's intimate and very human bleakness in it, and never wavered, even if a different ending might have been more palatable. I also adore near-future fiction (blame my dad for making me read a lot of Cory Doctorow as a kid) and this captured that feeling of a future that is so close and so awful and so real.

Anyway, had a GREAT time with this, love a good strange sci-fi book.

A Brief History of Living Forever does what science fiction should do — exploring questions of life through the presentation of an alternative world. Perfect for fans of the genre and those look for a quality dystopian read.

This book was wild as all hell. It was also depressing as all hell. The concept of America of being completely fascist and authoritarian, did not lighten the book. I guess that's where the depressing part comes in. IT definitely gave me some big brother is watching vibes.

When Adéla contracts a terminal illness, her thoughts turn to Tereza, the daughter she gave up at birth, forty years earlier. Leaving behind her moody, grown son, Roman, in their rural Czech village, she tracks down her daughter in New York City. But the America of 2029, with its authoritarian government and closed borders, is a different place from the country she experienced as a young woman, when she eloped with a filmmaker and starred in his cult sci-fi movie.

The bulk of the book in the future is Tereza (her daughter) and Roman (her son), trying to find Adéla and bring her home after her death. and she is disposed of in a mass grave for undocumented imigrants. It was really sad, and felt almost realistic in the direction that America is already heading with the anti-immigration mind set. We get a wonderful story of Adela traveling to America to find her American Dream.

I really loved Tereza. I love how excited she was to meet her mom, and the balls that she had to travel to the Czech republic, to meet a brother she never knew (Roman who was kind of a dick). I really just couldn't get over this book. and I'm struggling to put into words what it made me feel. All I know is that I can't wait for this to come out, so I can grab a physical copy!

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this unique and thought-provoking book!