44 pages • 1 hour read
Chloe BenjaminThe Immortalists
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 13-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Proteus, 1982-1991 – Klara”
Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary
The novel moves back in time to June 1982 at Simon’s funeral. Klara returns home and reunites with her family. She’s back again three months later for the Jewish High Holy days. Throughout all of this time, Varya has been living with Gertie, and Daniel is in medical school. Gertie is distraught at the loss of her son, and she meets with her Rabbi privately. She feels abandoned by God, saying “There was no relief. There would never be any relief” (122).
In January of 1983, Klara sees Eddie O’Donoghue in the audience of three of her shows. He is the cop who once harassed Simon. After the third show, Eddie apologizes to Klara for his treatment of Simon and tells her the show has changed him: “I guess one way to put it is you gave me faith” (126). Eddie kisses her, and Klara lets him at first, then pushes him away and disappears.
Klara returns to New York for the third time around the anniversary of Simon’s death. Varya has moved out and is attending NYU for graduate school. While in her childhood bed, Klara hears a rap and thinks it is Simon.
In 1986, Klara spends the anniversary of Simon’s death in the Castro and visits Purp. She reveals that she stayed in touch with Robert briefly after Simon’s death and encouraged him to enroll in a medical trial for AIDS. He soon quit and moved back to Los Angeles, and she has not heard from him since. That evening, Klara takes as bath, hears a rap, and again thinks it is Simon.
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary
In June 1988, Klara and Raj successfully perform Second Sight at Teatro ZinZanni. The club invites them to perform ten more shows.
Klara travels to New York to visit her family for the High Holy Days, something that has become a tradition. She reveals that she plans on marrying Raj soon, and the two have already decided to do so once she gets home. She is also pregnant and has stopped drinking.
Klara gives birth to a baby girl, who they name Ruby. Her family comes to visit, and Gertie offers a lot of advice about Ruby, who she comes to adore. Klara and Raj have not been able to perform since her pregnancy, and they are suffering financially. Raj suggests that they take their act on the road as clubs in San Francisco are not receptive to their work.
Klara continues to hear the knocks, which she believes to be Simon. One night with Raj, “The knock was loud as a gunshot; even the baby yelped” (135). Raj insists that there is nothing there. Later that night, Klara stays up late and practices with the items she keeps in her old teacher Ilya’s box, such as her scarves. She drinks vodka secretly.
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary
Klara and Raj buy a motor home and begin to take their show on the road. They meet some success, and “[t]hey land two gigs at a casino in Santa Rosa, four at a resort in Lake Tahoe” (140). They make some money, but not much more than they were making in San Francisco.
Klara continues to drink: “She keeps miniature bottles of vodka in her makeup case, which she prefers for their clarity and smarting punch, for the way they tear her throat” (141). She successfully hides her drinking from Raj.
Klara thinks about the prophecy and wonders if it will be true of her as it was true for Simon. She has still not told her siblings that the prophecy was accurate about Simon’s death, and she has not told them about the knocking.
One night, Klara tries to time out the knocks and discern a code, thinking that the first ones spell out M and E. Raj wakes up, and the two talk about the future. Klara confesses that she is unhappy and posits, “Maybe this is as far as we go […] I’m tired. I know you are, too. Maybe it’s time we both got real jobs” (145). However, Raj insists that Klara not give up on her dream. He restates that the real money is in Las Vegas, and Klara finally agrees to go there with him.
Part 2, Chapter 16 Summary
Klara and Raj arrive in Vegas and set up in an RV park. They rent a car and explore the new city. All the glitz overwhelms Klara. She notices many sights such as, “Showgirls and fake Elvises stand beside a live Chucky doll that waves […] with its knife-wielding hand” (150).
Raj tries his best to use his connections to get them a meeting with a club or hotel. After a meeting, he makes a connection with a man who works at the Golden Nugget. During this time, Klara keeps trying to communicate with Simon using the counting method. She sits with Saul’s watch, and the letters spell out meet.
Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary
Klara auditions for executives at The Mirage hotel. She performs the Proteus cabinet, Vanishing Birdcage, and Second Sight, but they remain unimpressed and distracted.
Before leaving, Klara decides to go back to her sleight of hand tricks, where she feels her skills are the greatest. She skillfully performs a card trick, the Raise Rise, which she has not practiced in a long time, and notes, “She shouldn’t be able to do it—but something is helping her. Something is pulling her back to the person she’s been all along” (155). This piques the executives’ attention.
She performs another trick with balls and quarters, making them disappear and reappear. During this time, she recites a monologue about the nature of reality and magic, saying, “I think magic holds the world together. It’s dark matter; it’s the glue of reality, the putty that fills the holes between everything we know to be true” (157). At the end, she is holding a strawberry instead of a ball. She has no idea where the strawberry came from.
The executives book her for an act in January, four months from now.
Part 2, Chapter 18 Summary
Raj and Klara prepare for their show, and Raj works on all of their equipment. Klara bends to the wants of the Mirage, and “She lets the costumer raise her hemline by five inches and lower her neckline by two, fit the chest with padded cups” (160).
Klara spends a lot of time thinking about Bruna’s prophecy, and “If the woman on Hester Street was right, she’ll die in two months” (161). Klara continues to drink, shoplift, and attempt to communicate with Simon in the ensuing months.
On December 28, 1990, just four days before opening, Klara communicates with Simon in the bathroom, getting the messages, meet, meet me, meet us. Raj discovers her in the bathroom, and points out that she has been ignoring Ruby, who has been crying.
Raj confronts her about talking to Simon as well as her drinking, insisting that she seek help once their payment and insurance come through.
Later that night, Klara swims in the RV park pool. She thinks of herself as a bridge between the two worlds and imagines “It doesn’t matter whether or when Klara dies; she can communicate with Ruby just as she does with Simon now” (167).
Part 2, Chapters 13-18 Analysis
Through these chapters, the author uses the lens of Klara to explore the theme of repression, which drives families apart. Klara is a character who keeps many secrets, two significant ones surrounding Simon. Firstly, she does not tell her family that Simon is suffering from AIDS, and Daniel confronts her about this, “Do you know how many times we called, Klara? […] And you going along with it, keeping his secrets, not even calling us” (120). Here, Klara’s secrecy helped to maintain the divide between Simon and the rest of the family, preventing them from gaining any sense of closure before his death.
Even after Simon’s death, Klara does not reveal that his death coincides with Bruna’s prediction. This secret creates a deep worry within her, as she questions whether the prediction will come true for her. Thus, these initial secrets pave the way for more and more secrets. Throughout all of this, Klara secretly drinks. This addictive substance, a frequent motif in the novel, only deepens the divide between her and her family. She does not even tell Raj about her drinking, alienating a person in her life who is unequivocally on her side.
Klara’s actions introduce the theme of fate. The narrative questions whether the characters control their own destinies. This is a key question for Klara, who goes back and forth as to the answer. She attempts to gain clarity by communicating with Simon, hoping his input can help her. A few days before her performance at the Mirage, and the predicted date of her death, Klara seems to transcend the question. She posits, “Perhaps the point is not to resist death. Perhaps the point is that there’s no such thing” (166). Here, she sidesteps the question of whether or not she will die and instead questions the nature of her reality. Thus, the author keeps the question of fate hanging in the balance, refusing to fall on one side or the other.
To continue the exploration of magic and fate, the author includes totemic objects in these chapters. They anchor the characters to both religion and magic, allowing them to explore conceptions of the divine and supernatural. Jewish rituals and ritual objects emerge during Simon’s funeral when the family attends temple and sits shiva. During Simon’s funeral, the Rabbi states, “The wicked are inscribed in the book of death, the virtuous in the book of life, but the fate of the in-between is suspended until Yom Kippur—and let’s be honest […] that’s most of us” (121). Here, these theoretical books act as objects that assign a destiny to the Jews, but the Rabbi also suggests that some fall in between. Here, the objects of the books are helpful in illustrating the religious afterlife of the Jews.
On the more secular side, Ilya’s black box emerges as a significant totemic object in these chapters. It is Klara’s anchor to her love of magic and contains her sleight of hand props. She reconnects to this box when she auditions for The Mirage, and the items from this book help her land her show. This object connects her to her original love and helps advance her career.
