A Brief History of Living Forever

Kalfař (Spaceman of Bohemia) imagines in his ingenious latest a near-future dystopia involving ghastly longevity experiments. It’s 2030, and a terminally ill Adéla Slavíková travels to America, which has descended into nativist fascism, to meet Tereza, the daughter she gave up for adoption. Tereza, a longevity researcher with no other family, hopes to prolong Adéla’s life, so she signs a lifetime contract with her shady employer, whose aim is to upload people’s consciousnesses to the cloud, in exchange for access to an experimental cell treatment for Adéla. But then Adéla dies, and her body goes missing. Tereza travels to the Czech Republic to break the news to her grandmother and half-brother, Roman, whom she learned about from Adéla during their meeting. After she and Roman both receive taunting messages, including one in Adéla’s voice saying “save me,” they set out to retrieve their mother’s body. Much of this is narrated by Adéla’s ghost, who recounts, among other things, distributing an illegal literary journal in communist Prague in the late 1970s. Kalfař draws many funny and chilling connections between Cold War era communist secret police and his imagined future fascist America (at the MoMA, a hologram of Vincent Van Gogh with an “absurd Dutch accent” scolds a child for defacing a painting, before pronouncing the child’s prison sentence of three years). With a perceptive satirical slant, sharp humor, and convincing emotion, Kalfař builds a plausibly terrifying world. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow and Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)