Several of the central Gold siblings are plagued by obsessive thoughts. Klara believes that her younger brother Simon and father Saul are trying to speak to her from beyond the grave; Daniel fixates on the fortune teller who predicted his and his siblings’ dates of death; and Varya is consumed by anxiety about avoiding any kind of harm or disease. In each case, these obsessive, all-consuming thoughts lead the characters to ruin—and in some cases end their lives. Through Klara, Daniel, and Varya, the book emphasizes that obsession is uncontrollable and can inflict irreparable damage on a person’s life.
The novel links Klara’s obsession with communicating with the dead to her eventual decision to commit suicide, illustrating how obsession can become so uncontrollable as to be deadly. On the fourth anniversary of Simon’s death, Klara hears “knocks,” which she interprets as Simon trying to talk to her. Klara is consumed by the idea that he is communicating with her, and when she continues to hear the knocks, she starts to time them. Each minute that passes corresponds to a letter of the alphabet: one for A, two for B, and so on. She starts to think that Simon is saying “Meet me.” She also views the message as proof that magic is real, and that Simon hasn’t fully left her. Ultimately, the knocks lead her to conclude that if she were to die, she would be able to communicate from beyond the grave as well. She decides to commit suicide on the night of the opening of her show in Las Vegas. She hears rapid knocks as she prepares to hang herself in the penthouse of The Mirage hotel and concludes that Simon is beckoning her to him. Even though the knocks are actually coming from someone who is worried about Klara’s safety, Klara’s obsessive thoughts take on a life of their own, fueling her decision to end her life.
Daniel is plagued by the desire to get revenge on the fortune teller for her predictions, and because his actions in confronting the fortune teller lead to his death, the novel further reinforces the danger in obsession. Following the deaths of Simon and Klara, Daniel is determined to find the fortune teller. He believes that Simon and Klara’s deaths were prompted by the woman’s predictions, and therefore he wants to get revenge on her. He looks up her background, figures out where she lives, and finds her on the very day that she predicted his death would occur because he is determined to prove her wrong. He is so possessed by the idea of getting revenge on her and proving that she caused his siblings’ deaths that he even takes a gun, hoping that she will confess that her predictions were the cause of Simon and Klara’s deaths. When an officer arrives on the scene, Daniel irrationally holds the fortune teller at gunpoint and refuses to back down, obsessed with ensuring that she pays for the harm she caused. But instead, the officer kills Daniel—his own obsessive need for vengeance led to his own death.
Varya also exemplifies how uncontrollable obsession can be, as her concern over remaining healthy and protecting her siblings leads her to ruin her relationships with them. The fortune teller predicts that Varya will live at least 40 years after the death of her other siblings. From then on, Varya notes, thinking about the prophecy is like a “virus.” She begins avoiding cracks in the sidewalk; on her 14th birthday, she feels it is “imperative to blow out all her candles as quickly as possible, because something awful would happen to Simon if she didn’t.” She misses three candles, and when Simon blows them out, she yells at him. Later in life, she decides to avoid her family because she is worried about causing their deaths. These thoughts are illogical, but it is precisely their uncontrollable nature that leads her to act irrationally and damage her relationships. Varya continues her obsessive thinking, aiming to protect not only her siblings but also the people around her. She describes to her therapist that “There was a period when the thought of killing a bicyclist while making a right turn caused Varya to follow any bicyclist for blocks, checking again and again to make sure she hadn’t.” This deep obsession with protecting others causes her to change her behavior in ways that paralyze her; when she grows older, she doesn’t have a meaningful relationship with any of her siblings, nor with anyone else. Her need to protect others is so great that she has cut herself off from everyone. Her obsession thus does more damage than the objects of her fears.
Before his death, Daniel writes a Jewish proverb on a piece of paper: “thoughts have wings.” When Varya finds this paper, she understands the “power of the human mind” and recognizes the irreparable harm that she and her siblings’ minds have caused them. The proverb suggests, as the book does, that thoughts can act of their own accord, hovering until they can no longer be ignored and wreaking havoc on a person’s life.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Obsession ThemeTracker
Obsession Quotes in The Immortalists
Thirteen years later, the woman was right about Simon, just as Klara had feared. But this is the problem: was the woman as powerful as she seemed, or did Klara take steps that made the prophecy come true? Which would be worse? If Simon’s death was preventable, a fraud, then Klara is at fault—and perhaps she’s a fraud, too. After all, if magic exists alongside reality—two faces gazing in different directions, like the head of Janus—then Klara can’t be the only one able to access it. If she doubts the woman, then she has to doubt herself. And if she doubts herself, she must doubt everything she believes, including Simon’s knocks.
Klara’s arms begin to shake. Sixty more seconds and she’ll give it up. Sixty more seconds and she’ll pack her rope, return to Raj and perform.
And then it comes.
Her breath is uneven, her chest shuddering; she cries thick, sloppy tears. The knocks are insistent now, they’re coming fast as hail. Yes, they tell her. Yes, yes, yes.
“Ma’am?”
Someone is at the door, but Klara doesn’t pause.
In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.
He saw that a thought could move molecules in the body, that the body races to actualize the reality of the brain. By this logic, Eddie’s theory makes perfect sense: Klara and Simon believed they had taken pills with the power to change their lives, not knowing they had taken a placebo—not knowing that the consequences originated in their own minds.
…Bruna is looking at him with a dubiousness that suggests another narrative: one in which he did not come intentionally at all but was compelled by the very same factors as Simon and Klara. One in which his decision was rigged from the start, because the woman has some foresight he can’t understand, or because he is weak enough to believe this.
No. Simon and Klara were pulled magnetically, unconsciously; Daniel is in full possession of his faculties. Still, the two narratives float like an optical illusion—a vase or two faces?—each as convincing as the other, one perspective sliding out of prominence as soon as he relaxes his hold on it.
When did it begin? She had always been anxious, but something changed after her visit to the woman on Hester Street. Sitting in the rishika’s apartment, Varya was sure she was a fraud, but when she went home the prophecy worked inside her like a virus. She saw it do the same thing to her siblings: it was evident in Simon’s sprints, in Daniel’s tendency toward anger, in the way Klara unlatched and drifted away from them.
Perhaps they had always been like this. Or perhaps they would have developed in these ways regardless. But no: Varya would have already seen them, her siblings’ inevitable, future selves. She would have known.
She no longer believed that Daniel died of a bullet meant for the pelvis but which entered his thigh, rupturing the femoral artery, so that all his blood was lost in less than ten minutes. His death did not point to the failure of the body. It pointed to the power of the human mind, an entirely different adversary—to the fact that thoughts have wings.
