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, Chapter 19-Part 3, Chapter 24 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Proteus, 1982-1991 – Klara”-Part 3: “The Inquisition, 1991-2006 – Daniel”
Part 2, Chapter 19 Summary
It is the night of the performance, and Raj and Klara arrive at The Mirage. Raj goes to set up, and Klara takes Ruby to daycare. She rides the elevator up to the top of the hotel and sneaks into a penthouse suite. Instead of preparing for her act, “She takes a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and Johnnie Walker Black Label, a Veuve Clicquot. She rotates between them, coughing on the champagne before she starts the cycle again” (170). She calls her family and tells them it is the night of her performance.
Klara then takes out a rope and attaches it to the ceiling. The novel makes it clear that she is not planning on performing but instead testing the prophecy, taking matters into her own hands. She wants to wait for knocks as a sign. She finally hears them, but it is someone at the door calling her name. At that point, she hangs herself.
Part 3, Chapter 20 Summary
The novel travels back to May 1987, when Daniel is at school in Chicago. He notices Mira a few times before they speak. One day, Mira sits down at Daniel’s table in the cafeteria, and the two begin talking. Mira reveals that she is studying Jewish art history.
A discussion about God and art ensues. Daniel reveals that he does not believe in God and thinks that humans invented him as a construct. He also touches on his own experience with Judaism.
Mira and Daniel get married, and as they are lying together in bed after their wedding, Daniel says a prayer: “Please, God, he thought. Oh God, may this last” (181).
Later, when the couple is living in Kingston, NY, Daniel asks if Mira deliberately sat with him, to which she assents.
Part 3, Chapter 21 Summary
In 2006, Daniel and Mira are living in Kingston, NY. Gertie has also come to live with them, and Daniel and Mira financially support her and Mira’s parents. Daniel works for the Military Entrance Processing Station.
10 days before Thanksgiving, he meets a colonel, his superior, who says, “You’ve served your country well. But I’m going to be blunt, Major. Some of us think it’s time you took a break” (183). Daniel has not been clearing enough men for service, and the colonel wants him to be more liberal because “We need guys, we need numbers, for God and country, and sometimes we get a guy come in here with a bad knee or a little cough” (185). Daniel refuses to bend his principles, and the colonel suspends him for two weeks.
That night, Daniel cannot sleep. He reflects on his siblings and how far apart they have grown. He looks at Raj and Ruby’s website, which advertises, “Experience the WONDERS OF INDIA without leaving your seat! Let RAJ AND RUBY take you on a MAGIC CARPET RIDE of otherworldly delights” (189). He has seen Ruby intermittently, but he and Raj had a falling when Raj was teaching Ruby the Jaws of Life. On the website, Daniel notices they will be in New York for a show soon, so he sends an email offering to host them for Thanksgiving.
The next morning, Eddie O’Donoghue calls, and the author reveals he has been working on Klara’s case with the FBI. Eddie says that he has some information on Klara and wants Daniel to meet him.
Part 3, Chapter 22 Summary
The novel flashes back to 15 years prior, right after Klara’s death. Feeling overwhelmed, Daniel drifts into a bar. He is “scarcely aware of how he looked, or what he was saying—Oh God, oh God; everyone’s dying—until someone responded” (198). He begins a conversation with Eddie O’Donoghue, who reveals his connection to Simon and Klara, with whom he was in love.
Eddie recalls seeing Klara in Vegas in the Vons parking lot and later discovering her show flyer. On the night of the opening, he sees her in the hotel and follows her up to the top floor. Eddie is the one to knock on the door and find her. Eddie asks Daniel if he suspects anyone else in Klara’s death, which seems strange. Daniel admits that he always found Raj controlling.
In the present, Daniel meets Eddie at a restaurant. Eddie reveals that the FBI has been investigating the Costellos, who are “Eighteen people running the most sophisticated fortune-telling fraud in U.S. history” (204). Daniel examines all of their pictures and recognizes the women from Hester Street in one.
Eddie explains that they offer healing rituals and fortune telling to extort money from their customers, oftentimes totaling tens of thousands of dollars. The FBI has been able to locate many members of the family, but not the woman in the picture. She deviates from others in that she works alone and lives in a filthy apartment, as Daniel recalls. She also did not ask for money.
Eddie is trying to link the woman to a number of suicides, including Klara’s. Daniel relates what he remembers from the day and leaves Eddie in a distraught manner. He has never shared the date of his supposed death with Mira, which is coming up soon.
Part 3, Chapter 23 Summary
Raj and Ruby arrive two days before Thanksgiving, and the family spends time together. It is, “Shocking to Daniel, how late they were up, even more shocking how well it went—a leisurely, two-hour dinner with his mother, his wife, his brother-in-law, and his niece, as if such a thing were normal for them, followed by chocolates and tea in the living room” (216).
Raj and Ruby have expensive clothes and luggage, which prompts Daniel to research them on the internet. He is shocked to see how wealthy they are, with an estate and millions of dollars.
The next morning, they have breakfast and spend the day together. That night, Ruby asks for pictures of Klara. Daniel goes through a photo album with her, talking about the family. Afterwards, he calls Eddie and reveals that Simon always said he would die young. The long-ago words of the rishika (the seer) still have their effect. Eddie reveals that the woman’s name is Bruna Costello.
Part 3, Chapter 24 Summary
Daniel wakes early on Thanksgiving. He Googles “Bruna” and finds her name on the FBI’s Most Wanted site; she is wanted for fraud and is the only member of the Costello family to evade questioning. Law enforcement believe she resides in a mobile home in Ohio.
As the family cooks, Daniel researches the Romani, the ethnic group of the Costellos. He learns that they were persecuted, and many were killed in the Holocaust.
Ruby drifts into his study, and the two talk about her future. She does not want to continue doing the act forever and wants to go to college. Daniel speaks a little about Klara, saying, ‘“Your mother. She was special,” […] “That doesn’t mean you have to be like her. I just want you to know”’ (233).
Part 2, Chapter 19-Part 3, Chapter 24 Analysis
As Klara’s trajectory wraps up and Daniel’s begins, the novel remains committed to exploring fate as an elusive construct. Before Klara kills herself, the author notes “She’s been waiting for something to prove that the woman’s prophecies were right. But this is the trick: Klara must prove it herself. She’s the answer to the riddle, the second half of the circle. Now, they work in tandem—back-to-back, head-to-head” (172). Here, Klara takes fate into her own hands, asserting her agency at the very last moment. She wants to participate in her own demise, if that is what is to be.
Daniel, on the other hand, has never given much credence to the divine. An atheist for most of his young life, he rejects the idea of God or a cosmic plan. However, the prophecy still has something of a hold on him, and the author notes:
He believes in bad choices; he believes in bad luck. And yet the memory of the woman on Hester Street is like a minuscule needle in his stomach, something he swallowed long ago and which floats, undetectable, except for moments when he moves a certain way and feels a prick (212).
There is something unshakeable about this prophecy for Simon, Klara, and Daniel, suggesting that Bruna Costello exerted power over them in some way.
Eddie’s information casts Bruna and the prophecies in a more callous, threatening light. He notes that the “Rom have been telling fortunes for hundreds of years with an equal amount of economic success” (208). When he paints Bruna as a con artist involved in one the biggest fortune telling scandals, he suggests that manipulation is at play. Bruna was potentially preying on the vulnerable for financial gain and pushed both Simon and Klara to their deaths in a sinister way. However, the idea of Bruna as a pure con artist is problematic because she accepts no money from the children and her lifestyle seems very different from all the others in the group.
This section continues to explore ritual objects and their power as signifiers in the characters’ lives. Even though Daniel is not religious, he has a Jewish wedding with the tradition of breaking a glass, and “During the breaking of the glass, he imagined his life until now shattering, too: its ignorance and anguish, its great and petty losses” (181). Here, he is able to tap into the symbolic significance of this ritual act. Gertie is still enmeshed in religious rituals, and she covers all the windows and mirrors after Klara’s death, saying, “That’s for your brother and your sister and your father” (195). These rituals give her comfort as she endures a string of loss.
