"Remember You Will Die" by Eden Robbins (2024)

 **One of the more remarkable books I've read in a while.  If you're in the mood for something different, can't recommend this one highly enough**

Honestly, superlatives fail me here.  Comparisons do too.  I guess it's like if Julian Barnes, Ted Chiang, and Jorge Luis Borges wrote a book together?  That's the best I can do, hah!

Ok, let's back up.  So, this book is written almost entirely in obituaries.  The framing device, we quickly learn, is that it's an AI's attempt to process the death by suicide of its human daughter (the first obituary in the novel)

After that, each subsequent obituary connected to the previous one.  A person mentioned in one obituary is the subject of the next, so the flow almost like someone clicking on links around Wikipedia.  It can be a little disorienting, and I was very glad that each obituary had a date at the top so I could keep track of the timeline

(in addition, I was reading an ebook version, meaning it was easy to search and see when a character had been mentioned previously--this was *very* helpful, every time I had to go, "oh I remember this name, who was she?  Oh, right, she was the lab tech mentioned in that scientist's obituary."  I'd go so far as to say that this book would be difficult to follow in print and almost impossible in audiobook, so take that as a warning)

So, for example, at one point early in the book we read the obituary of Aristotle Williams, "Controversial Artist Who Built the AI Body", dated 2093 and detailing among other things how he is most notable for having built a body that allowed an AI to take human form.  In this obituary, it's mentioned briefly that he was inspired by the work of the artist Krü Wetley

Turn the page, and we're now reading the New York Times obituary of Krü Wetley, dated 1988.  It is mentioned that "he was 26 years old and had been ill for some time"

Turn the page, and we're now reading the obituary in The Brown County Democrat for Albert Rogers Jr., Krü Wetley's birth name.  The article mentions how much he loved singing in church and walking in the woods with his dog, and gives details for the memorial service

Turn the page, and we're now reading the obituary in The New York Native, "Krü Wetley, Precocious and Talented Gay Sculptor, Dies of AIDS", which tells us a bit more of the story:

The New York Times loves to pretend that scores of brilliant young gays are suddenly dying in droves by a million vague concerns. AIDS does not exist in the lexicon of Times obituaries, and Krü’s death is no exception. But Krü Wetley died of AIDS; he had not merely been “ill for some time” like some consumptive Victorian lady. He was a gay man with many lovers and friends, all of whom watched helplessly as his body was ravaged by this disease. There would probably be a part of Krü that would be tickled by the vagueness of his official obit, the way it lets the reader fill in the gaps. But there would be another part of him that would rage. For all his mischievous experimentation, Krü loathed when others tried to define him on their terms. He raged when AIDS succeeded. 

(the obituary in The Native also mentions "A memorial will take place in the form of an all-night dance party in his loft at 7 Tailor Lane on April 10, where we will be entertained by Krü’s muse—the infamous Scarlett Schwartz and her famous snake striptease—from 11 p.m. until the yuppie neighbors call the cops. We think Krü would have approved.")

Turn the page, and we're reading the obituary of Scarlett Schwartz, legendary erotic performer, dated 2009.  

Turn the page, and we're reading a correction:  "An obituary from November 17, 2009, for Mrs. Scarlett Schwartz, burlesque dancer, entrepreneur, and socialite, misstated that she left no living descendants. Mrs. Schwartz is survived by a daughter, Claudia Blondell of San Jose, California, age 52. The Inquirer learned of this error through recent email correspondence with Ms. Blondell’s attorney."

Turn the page, and we're reading the obituary of Claudia Blondell, dated 2044

And so the book continues.  The brilliant conceit of having the story told in obituaries gives a fantastic sense of perspective, driving home the idea that it's hard to tell what to make of a person's life before it's over (and even, as with the multiple versions of Krü's obituary, accounts and perspectives can vary).  In turn though, the connections of these obituaries drive home the lesson quite clearly of how we are all connected to everyone both before and after us.  We are the product of so many that came before us, parents and mentors and inspirations.  In turn, we live on through all the people our lives touch.  This message permeates throughout the entire novel, not just in its words but in the very shape of the book itself

I loved this novel because of how it balances these two contradictions of humanity:  We are each of us unique and indivisible; and we are each of us supremely connected to everyone around us.  

For the first point, so many of these obituaries (and yes, some of them don't read like any obituary I've ever seen, which has been pointed out in some critical reviews.  Curmudgeons, the lot of them) are gorgeous little Borges-style portraits of a unique and special person.  While many of the characters in this novel are exceptional figures, artists who shocked the world with their daring or scientists who bucked the trends of their times, there are just as many ordinary people whose lives had beauty in their own ways, who had something to tell us.  Or simply a new way of looking at the world to show us, each time we turned the page

The 1975 obituary of actress Dante Pellegrino (whose work would go onto inspire countless artists, throughout the novel) is poignant in its point of view:

Dante Pellegrino’s disdain for the medium of film was well known. It was an industry she felt profited off “the seductive egoism of immortality, the desire to have one’s face pinned to eternity, like a butterfly. How horrific,” she once said, “to never be allowed to die.”

[. . .]

Profoundly mistrustful of her own legacy, Dante Pellegrino would have hated this belated obituary. But then again, such remembrances are not for the dead at all. They are for the living—the living now and the living to come. Remember us, we whisper into the ears of the future. Our mistakes have made you possible.

Late in the novel, a quick discussion of artist Joseph Pompée actually got me to laugh out loud:

For his undergraduate thesis, Joe examined the single known poem of a 19th-century child poet named Ruby Williams, daughter of a famed abolitionist, who wrote it from inside her family’s print shop as it burned to the ground. Claiming to have solved the mystery of the cause of the fire that consumed her, Pompée pointed to the code of smudges and misspellings in the poem, which he said spelled out “police chief.” 

The day the thesis was due, he printed three copies for his professors with his own money and distributed “The Eternal Desire of the Featherless Biped: Steganography of an Unknown Poet.” The title was a quote sometimes attributed to Flaubert, but the featherless biped was what Plato called human beings. That is, until that stinker Diogenes plucked a chicken and waggled it at Plato, saying “Behold, I brought you a man!” Plato, rightly irritated, adjusted the definition of human to include “with broad flat nails” so no one might waggle a chicken at him again. Diogenes moved on to bigger and better things: he slept in a can like Oscar the Grouch, masturbated in public, peed on people. 

Joseph Pompée got an F on his thesis. Because he was a business major. But his “F” didn’t matter. He became a finance bro.

How about this one, we get a beautiful love story in just three paragraphs:

Jimenez got behind the camera, making short experimental films and then hiding them in her closet. This was, she claimed, “an exploration of the idea that art does not need an audience to be considered art.” She called the project “If a Tree Falls,” but Ana de la Cova, now art critic at the Chicago Tribune, called it “Fear of Failure” and refused to review it. 

The two were rumored to be lovers, despite the decade-plus age difference and the fact that neither identified as queer. De la Cova was the only person entrusted with viewing the films, which she repeatedly begged Jimenez to release to the public, calling them “haunting and breathtaking.” In response, Jimenez did a performance piece where she piled the film reels outside the AMC 20 Theater in Old Town and set them ablaze while screaming “I will not be a pinned butterfly!” The fire department was summoned and a hefty fine delivered. She called the piece “Ana’s Betrayal.” 

De la Cova reviewed the performance in the Tribune, calling it “muddled in its execution.”

And yet, for all these little vignettes, the second part I pointed out above is how we are all connected.  And as the framing device of the book, the AI trying to process the loss of her daughter, reads more and more . . . we the reader wonder what the AI is thinking, as we read along with it.  Does the AI come to understand that we're all connected, and that saying goodbye is indeed saying goodbye and we have to accept that all humans die . . . but also that saying goodbye isn't really saying goodbye, as long as those connections remain?  I hope so.  I hope, by the end of this book, the AI has found some measure of peace

This book isn't perfect, as I mentioned above it can be very hard to follow at times.  I laugh when I imagine the author plotting it out, rearranging notecards scattered about, I can only assume.  In her Afterword, she cheekily adds, "With apologies to the CIA if you’ve been tracking my online search history—now you know why I looked especially deranged between 2021 and 2023."

But goddamn if these vignettes aren't incredibly well-written, gorgeous little encapsulations of these people's lives.  And goddamn if this book doesn't make me appreciate the way our entire human community is linked to each other.  That's a pretty remarkable accomplishment

I loved this book

“We leave droplets of ourselves wherever we go, trade them with everyone we meet.”