Eternal Life

De: Dara Horn

Narrado por: Elisabeth Rodgers

The award-winning, critically acclaimed author returns with an ingenious novel about what it would mean to live forever.

Rachel has an unusual problem: she can't die. Her recent troubles - widowhood, a failing business, an unemployed middle-aged son - are only the latest. She's already put up with scores of marriages and hundreds of children, over 2,000 years - ever since she made a spiritual bargain to save the life of her first son back in Roman-occupied Jerusalem. There's only one other person in the world who understands: a man she once loved passionately, who has been stalking her through the centuries, convinced they belong together forever.

In 2018, as her children and grandchildren develop new technologies for immortality, Rachel knows she must enable her beloved offspring to live fully-without her, but with meaning - by finding a way for herself to die.

Gripping, hilarious, and profoundly moving, Eternal Life celebrates the bonds between generations, the power of faith, the purpose of death, and the reasons for being alive.

©2018 Dara Horn (P)2018 Recorded Books

Creative!

I listen to so many books that I'm happy to find ones that stretch the imagination without becoming an outright fantasy novel. This might not be at the very top of my list but I give it 5 stars for a great idea well-developed.

Is It Worth It to Live Forever as a Jew?

There’s a great passage in the Reform Jewish High Holiday prayer book that asks the question – and I paraphrase language that’s really beautiful – whether we would choose to live forever if the price were that we would never have a new generation to follow us. In this novel, Dara Horn asks the question in different fashion: would we want eternal life if it meant birthing generation after generation with the certainty that we would live to see them dies.

As with everything Horn writes (and I think I’ve read most of her novels by this point) there’s a lot of thought behind it. She’s interrogating some of the deepest axioms of the Jewish experience: why do we value peoplehood so much even though none of us can trace that peoplehood through an unbroken line, or, what does it mean to value a tradition based on Temple worship when, as we know from history, our Rabbinic tradition supplanted it through a combination of violence and philosophy.

Our protagonist, Rachel, is a reimagining of the Wandering Jew; she is “cursed” to live without dying because of a bargain she made in the Temple to spare the life of her son, Yohanan. Over time we learn – though Horn drops hints throughout – that Yohannon is no ordinary figure. History knows him as Yohanan ben Zakkai (though, in Horn’s imagination he is actually the grandson of the Temple’s High Priest) and he is, essentially, the founder of Rabbinic Judaism. He’s the sage who escapes Vespasian’s siege of Jerusalem – the siege that would end with the destruction of the Temple – in a coffin so that he could establish the first great Rabbinic academy at Yavneh. Rachel has, inadvertently, given up her own death so that Judaism will also never die.

So, in at least some respects, Rachel is a kind of Rip van Winkle. She is (with the exception of her recurring lover Elazar) the only person who can remember a Judaism radically different from the one we know today. She knows the power of the Temple – after all, it was the High Priest who caused her to live forever – and she knows the ephemeral nature of all life that has followed. As a result, she has a jaundiced view of the faith around her. She’s hardly Orthodox in her opinions, yet she can’t seem to throw off what she inherits of her tradition. Horn isn’t entirely clear about it, but it appears that each of Rachel’s fifty or sixty families (she’ll appear as a young woman, marry, and then live with a family for a couple generations) is Jewish. That is, she’s bound to a tradition she doesn’t quite embrace. She is a literal duplication of the Matriarchal Rachel who is ever weeping for her children, who watches them experience a world that ever threatens them.

Anyway, all of that is how this novel “thinks.” Horn, a fine scholar before she was a novelist, is always good at using fiction to frame larger questions. Beyond that, though, while she is often a fine stylist, she’s simply less good at some of the technical work of making a novel sing. She can develop character and setting very well, but I think she misses the larger subtlety of what time and era can do to someone. As much as I enjoy most of this, I can’t help being frustrated that the flashback conversations of two millennia ago sound an awful lot like the family conversations of today. For all the discontinuity she explores, she imagines every Jewish family sounding a lot like every other Jewish family; Rachel’s mother of 2000 years ago scolds her the same way her son of the 21st Century scolds his own daughter. I’d like, that is, to get a deeper sense of how the very concept of the individual has changed, at the ways a radically changed culture have changed the ways we value and even define the self.

That’s a fairly small concern next to the larger pleasure of this ambitious and thoughtful work, though. I’m glad to have Horn’s voice as such a prominent one in contemporary Jewish-American fiction, and I’ll be ready for the next one she rolls out too.

examine concepts around lives worth living

I enjoyed n looking at evaluating life, a twist on reincarnation, star crossed soul mates, plus science and religion through the ages.
Fabulous and rich concept. I dinged one star because sometimes, often actually, she seemed so in love with writing, the story staled out at times. I became restless and wanted the next plot point.
I loved the ending. How could you ever really end this story? But she did. And it was grand.

Not thrilling, but insightful.

The story lagged in some places, but if you are trying to convey the meaning of an eternal earthly life, it has to. I don't think I would listen again, and it will never be a favorite, but it's a solid story, logically and realistically thought out. I would recommend it.

Engrossing Listen

Great story, wonderfully performed, engaging from beginning to end. With a little more involvement between the two main characters with a little more detail of how each fit themselves into various historical eras, this could have been a great trilogy.

Love this book

This is a book that will stay with you for a long time. A great Jewish novel and a story about what is important in life.

Satisfying to the end.

Amazing and original plot.
Well performed.
Colossal scale and not predictable.
Very focused themes.
Humor, charm and gravity.

Absolutely Brilliant!

I purchased this audiobook on a whim, as a 'Dailly Deal'. Those often seem to be hit or miss, usually a miss. But not this one! The story itself is fascinating; focusing on the story of an Israeli woman, whom has inadvertently managed to become immortal. It deals with the many losses in her very long life, and questions her sanity in dealing with said immortality.

So, a very fascinating subject, helped by an outstanding narrative performance. The narration alone could easily carry this audiobook.

I highly suggest listening to this!

good read

Is a good average read a basic good storyline the narrator's voice was good except for the child voice in the story was nerve wracking

Incredibly Beautiful

Imaginative and beautifully writtem, this novel BB takes us through two thousand years.of immortality.