“It showed that my wife’s maternal side had been living in Norway for 260 years,” wrote Gleichmann in his blog, “and had made many significant contributions to society … So when I looked at this I was very impressed because I hadn’t really seen a family tree before. His Norwegian wife received from her uncle, an elderly Norwegian aristocrat obsessed with their family genealogy, an invitation that contained a family tree stretching back 350 years. The genesis of this book might have been one of the fictional yarns dreamed up in this epic novel by the Hungarian/Swedish/Norwegian journalist/literary critic/publisher Gabi Gleichmann (born in Budapest in 1954). Despite (the pre-publication notice) in Kirkus Review deeming it “memorable, sure to be one of the big novels of the season,” the volume seems to have suffered the fate of serious books that are published in paperback. The Elixir of Immortality seems to have escaped the attention of book editors everywhere in the U.S. Still, nothing prepared me for how much I would love this book or how astonished and upset I would be by the lack of review attention it has received in the United States. Written in Swedish, The Elixir of Immortality has already been translated into 11 languages and was greeted in Europe with raves. Its foreword is by the late Serbo-Croatian fiction writer Danilo Kiš, a longtime favorite of mine. Two of the thoughtful blurbs on Gabi Gleichmann’s The Elixir of Immortality were written by writers I admire hugely – Norman Manea and Cynthia Ozick. Other Press, 768 pages, paperback, $18.95.Ī few novels are so thoroughly engrossing that one feels compelled to reread them immediately. Translated from the Swedish by Michael Meigs. The Elixir of Immortality by Gabi Gleichmann. Love stories, treachery, brilliant plans, history itself gone awry – it’s all here in inspiring abundance in this fabulous novel, where the Spinozas make their way through hundreds of years of European history.
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