Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins: Review by Ian Mond

Remember You Will Die, Eden Robins (Source­books Landmark 978-1-72825-603-0, $16.99, 336pp, tp) October 2024.

It has been another excellent year for uncon­ventional narratives. There’s Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, which I called “a full-frontal deconstruction of narrative and genre”; there’s Rita Bullwinkel’s magnificent Headshot, a story structured around the intense, chaotic and bal­letic bouts of a junior girl’s boxing tournament; and there are the 1,281 F-bombs that punctuate the “Lowry section” of Jeff VanderMeer’s eye-opening Southern Reach prequel, Absolution. Eden Robins’s new book, with its foreboding title, Remember You Will Die, might be my favourite of this year’s bunch, told almost exclusively through obituaries. I wasn’t so much struck by Robins’s boldness of telling a story in this manner – though it is impressive – but rather the deft, graceful way she juggles several themes and genres, whether they be artificial intelligence, motherhood, time travel, Jewish mysticism, or outsider art.

In one sense, the plot is straightforward – at least for your average science fiction fan. Peregrine, an artificial intelligence ported into the facsimile of a human body, is searching through several cen­turies of obituaries, trying to come to terms with the death of her human daughter. In another sense, the novel is a rabbit warren of branching tunnels, tangents and cul-de-sacs. It starts with a news article published on November 6, 2102, reporting the drowning of a teenage girl. “The girl allegedly folded a piece of paper into the shape of an airplane and threw it toward shore, then dove into the river, never to resurface.” The article is followed by the etymology of the word “poppy” – the name of Per­egrine’s daughter and the identity of the drowned teenager. The term is defined, the origin explained and then used in a sentence. These etymologies – of words like “collapse,” “legacy,” and “grief” – are peppered throughout the narrative, providing a glimpse of Peregrine’s state of mind, such as when she looks up the etymology of “hide” and puts it into a sentence. “Did Poppy keep pieces of herself hidden from me? Parts of her an unknown un­ known” (Peregrine echoing Donald Rumsfeld). After the etymology of “Poppy,” we come to our first obituary, a Mr Crowley, an expert in floriography (the art of attributing meaning and language to flowers) killed during the American Civil War. We are told by the author of the piece that “Mr Crowley was an artist, a man of science, a lover of love… I weep for his wasted vitality, I weep for his roses, withering on their vines, and for the poppy that will grow on the battlefield where he exhaled his final breath.”

I’ve walked you through the first few pages of the novel partly to give you a taste of the structure but mainly because a traditional plot précis won’t convey the word-associational quality of the text, the way it skips between time periods (going back to the Roman Empire) and jumps between top­ics. In taking us on this winding journey, Robins brilliantly layers a portrait of Peregrine, her “maker and consort” Matthew Fletcher, and the individuals, many of them artists, who directly and indirectly led to Peregrine’s creation and the extraordinary birth of a human daughter. Along the way, we’re introduced to a version of Anne Frank that’s very different to the one we know – I’m deliberately being vague – and we learn about Dante Pellegrino, the famed silent actor, and her involvement in a controversial 1926 film chroni­cling the legend of Saint Wilgefortis. (“Most of the movie consisted of lengthy intimate close-ups of the eponymous Wilgefortis’s face [as played by Pellegrino]).” The Wilgefortis section comes around a quarter of the way through the novel, and if I wasn’t already in love with Remember You Will Die, this most certainly sealed the deal.

As I suggested above, Remember You Will Die is about many things. It’s about mothers and daughters, it’s about outsider art, it’s about sentience and artificial intelligence, it’s about the nature of time, it’s about the Tzadikm Nistarim or Lamed vovniks (the 36 righteous people in each generation who, according to the Talmud, are in connection with God and sustain the world). These themes and concepts might initially seem random, and to an extent, that’s true based on the novel’s haphazard structure, where a theme is picked up and then dropped after a handful of pages only to be engaged later in the book. But just as we come to understand the influences and tensions that led to Peregrine’s development and her daughter’s birth, an overarching theme also emerges. As the title states, we will all die no matter who we are, how famous or ordinary. In the same way, our legacy is not something we can control, our obituary will be an imperfect encapsulation of our imperfect lives. Whether we are one of the 36 or an outsider artist not recog­nised in their lifetime or an artificial intelligence in a sculpted body dealing with grief, we are all trying to make sense of this brief time we have. None of us is guaranteed epiphanies or closure; just a hope that what we did and left behind meant something to someone.

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This review and more like it in the December 2024 issue of Locus.

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