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Book notes - A Brief History of Living Forever, by Jaroslav Kalfar
(First, a brief apology - I am not going to attempt the diacritics on the Czech names herein 
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(Secondly, I'm pretty sure we read Capek's Rossum's Universal Robots in the book club once, and this book leans heavily on his War with the Newts)
This was an interesting one! I'm not entirely sure I can say that I liked it, as the topic and near future described in it is very dark, and the story itself ends in a way which is kind of existentially hopeless for the main character. But it's undoubtedly well written and original - it's a book where I didn't find myself frequently thinking of other older books along the same line.
The story follows two timelines, one spanning a few months around 2030, and the other a few years in the 1970s and 80s. The protagonist is the same in both, but appears as a young woman in the earlier timeline, and (obviously) a much older one in the later. Her young life was spent initially as a rebel in communist Czechoslovakia, and subsequently as a refugee and illegal immigrant in the southern US. She spends part of this time obsessively making a cheap (and ultimately unsuccessful) film based on Karel Capek's War with the Newts (Capek is better known for another novel in which he coined the term robot). She flees America in the end in order to return to Europe - no longer under communist rule but sliding into right-wing nationalism.
Her old self decides to visit her daughter (given up for adoption to a Danish family but now living in America) to bid a final farewell. America by this time has slid into an inward-looking ultra-right-wing state in which outsiders are treated with extreme suspicion. Mother and daughter have one happy afternoon together, but the mother dies alone on returning to her hotel. However, despite being clinically dead, she still has awareness and an ability to move around as a kind of virtual entity. Now, the daughter happens to be working for a large corporation working on several fronts towards longevity, and we eventually learn that the mother's continued awareness is caught up with an ongoing bio/technological experiment run by the corporation.
We follow the daughter's journey back to Czechoslovakia, her reunion with a half-brother, and her attempt to get the mother's body relocated to her home for proper burial. But, perhaps inevitably, the longevity corporation has a different agenda, and the book closes with the daughter being persuaded that her mother's virtual continuation of life is a Good Thing... a sentiment that the mother, able to witness events but not take part in them, radically disagrees with.
So it's not an easy or fun book, with a gloomy view of future politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The continued analogy with War with the Newts is fascinating - in that book, the newts are exploited by humans but ultimately gain the ascendancy and systematically enslave humans and flood large portions of coastal nations to increase the oceans. In A Brief History of Living Forever, climate change is eroding the coast - so that the remains of Florida are not all that different between the two pictures - and most of humanity is being reduced to a kind of slave status. Kalfar clearly feels some kinship with Capek.
It's a little hard to see what message Kalfar wants the reader to take away from the book, other than the clear belief that right wing nationalism is in the ascendant. There are frequent situations where people "read" each other in quite erroneous ways, and correspondingly one infers how easy it is for one person to make false assumptions about another. There's another thread which treats life extension and longevity as probably cruel and problematic studies rather than areas of opportunity. But there's not a lot of positive takeaway from the book, and there's something of a sense of "now we're screwed and there's nothing we can do about it".
Who would like it? I don't think it's a book for newcomers to speculative or dystopian fiction. Unlilke some other dystopian works, it is not dealing with life in the aftermath of some calamity, but rather in the days leading up to the catastrophe, which makes it all the more challenging as a read. The reader has to be willing to tackle difficult stuff set only a very small number of years in the future. But it's certainly compelling, and a challenging and original story line, and I would happily recommend it to anyone who likes that kind of exploration.
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