New Book Alert: Life is Big by Kiki Denis; Bizarre, Undefinable, but Unforgettable Tale About Life, Death, Interconnectivity, and Achieving Immortality
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
PopSugar Reading Challenge: A book with only words on the cover
Spoilers: Kiki Denis' book Life is Big is not an easy book to categorize. It's a fantasy that focuses on life after death. It's a science fiction because it explores scientific and technological achievements and how researchers quantify our everyday existence, even thought and emotion. It's a satire in which many characters' discoveries and theories are so extreme that they become ridiculous. It's a tragedy that discusses death and how connected we are to each other in strange but meaningful ways. It's bizarre, weird, and sometimes confusing. But most of all, Life is Big is a book that is unforgettable and hard to get out of your mind.
Because Life is Big is such a difficult book to categorize, it is also a difficult book to summarize the plot. It's neither long nor unwieldy, but it takes the point of view of 11 characters all with their own stories, pursuits, beliefs, and agendas. It seems to tell 11 different stories, but the chapters reveal that they are somehow connected to each other in different ways.
The first character that we meet is Alma-Jane, AKA A.J. A.J. is a brilliant 11-year-old girl who is the most genetically happiest person on the planet. (Seriously, she took a test for it.) Unfortunately, because of a genetic mutation, she is dying. A.J., her brother, Ayrtron, and friend, Alejandro have declared war on death. The trio use their mighty brain power (and these kids are geniuses so that brain power is mighty), to find a way to beat death or at least give A.J., a few more years of life. A.J. and Ayrtron have created a website which if successful could help change A.J.'s gene color (which is a contributing factor to her illness.). A.J. also is using the brief time that she has left researching other people who have genetic happiness and consoling a woman whose genetic happiness is zero.
Ayrtron also has another project going on. In cyberspace, he assumes the identity of a 42 year old scientist and gives advice to adult geniuses. (They wouldn't listen to advice from a kid, but maybe from another adult, he reasons.) He calculates heartbeats and thoughts in a person's lifetime. During his studies, he communicates with another scientist, Lazslo, who claims to have part of Einstein's brain in a jar. Ayrtron may be a genius kid, but he is still a kid. He recklessly books a flight to London to visit Laszlo and the brain so he can continue his studies.
Their buddy, Alejandro is also studying the behaviors of an iCub, Qining particularly while it interacts with him and A.J. He wants to study "the little brain people", how the mind works. He asks Qning questions such as whether it is alive and how it feels not to have a father.(Qning was created by a female inventor.)
In their own way and through their private studies, the trio are trying to find some meaning in their lives, and answer questions about the overall key to existence. Maybe through their researches, they are not only hoping to save A.J.'s life, but find something lasting, recognition that will outlive them.
The kids aren't the only ones who are doing bizarre scientific research. Ayrtron's online friend, Laszlo, also has his own studies, creating the Potentiality Puzzle, which measures happiness, delight, and fearlessness in a person. He was inspired by his late girlfriend, Sonia who was the smartest and most fearless person that he knew. Sonia had a mentor, Dr. Maurits Harvey, who created genetically modified mice so he could study their thought patterns and emotions. Sonia was on her way to meet Dr. Harvey when she booked a flight on September 11,2001, so her research remained unfinished. The once self-conscious, Laszlo is determined to continue her work, ironically becoming more fearless in his pursuits.
Another of Harvey's protegees, Lila, is also interested in studying happiness. In fact, she created the Overall Happiness test that determined A.J's score. This book contains a great deal of interconnectivity between characters, mostly through their reasearch. Names are dropped that become prominent later. One person's research proves beneficial to another.
The connection between Lila and A.J. is particularly compelling. Lila was given up for adoption by her birth mother, Raduska. A.J. got the highest score on Lila's happiness study and consoles a woman online whose happiness level is zero. The woman whose happiness level is zero is, ta da, Raduska, Lila's birth mother. A.J.'s research not only gives her recognition and meaning, but it also provides answers to Lila and Raduska.
Oh yes, Dr. Harvey's scientific work has continued beyond his death as well. His chapter is told not from his perspective but from that of one of his mice, Mighty-11. Mighty-11 and the other mice, called the Mighties, have created their own society inside Harvey's lab,where the elder mice educate the younger. Yes, a talking mouse narrates one of the chapters. Did I mention this book was bizarre?
This book is almost satirical in describing the various theories that these geniuses create and study. They demonstrate how scientific minds analyze and quantify everything, even that which cannot be necessarily quantified. How do you measure things like Happiness, Contentment, or Love? What is the process in measuring emotions, intuition, things that by definition resist being measured? What would the results prove, that some people are happier than others? How? Many people in real life do study behaviors and there are lists about the "happiest countries" or "happiest states". But, this book takes those studies to the extreme by giving us characters who live to find a solution to everything, even that which cannot be truly measured.
As if the dying happy little girl, the oddball research, the sentient AI, the talking mice, coincidence of a mother and daughter being linked through the dying happy little girl, and Einstein's brain didn't make this book weird, things get even weirder. We meet Albert Einstein (yes that one) who now lives as one of the Great Immortals with his girlfriend, Sabina, the female protagonist of Milan Kundera's novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Yes, a deceased historical figure and a fictional character have shacked up in the cyberspace equivalent of the Afterlife. It's that kind of book. However, as anyone who studied Einstein's life knows how troubled his real-life marriages to his wives, Mileva and Elsa were, it makes sense that he would not want to spend eternity with either of them. He is attracted to Sabina's "lightness," and ever the scientist, he is fascinated by and studies it.
Einstein is also friends with Alfred Butts, the creator of the board game, Scrabble and Pablo Neruda, the poet who spends his time after death flying kites. These three are considered Great Immortals, people who are missed by many because they left something behind from a scientific theory that changed the world, to Nobel Prize winning poetry, to a board game played by millions.
Then there are people like Socrates, no not the philosopher (I am actually surprised he's not), but A.J. and Ayrtron's grandfather and his wife, Sofia. They are concerned Minor Immortals, because they are only remembered by friends and family, the people that they loved.
Meanwhile, Death and his younger brother, Hypnos AKA Obituary Man or O.M., also get their two cents in. They argue over who to push The Button on, i.e. who is going to die. Death still is ticked off with O.M. for making an unauthorized switch by trading one person's life for another. Death who is pretty cranky also has a conversation with the soon to be late, Grandma Sofia that indicates that he doesn't always like his job but rules are rules. It takes a lot of convincing to persuade Death to bend the rules one more time.
Reading about Denis' version of the Afterlife is similar to the one in Thomas Milhorat's Melia in Foreverland, where famous and average people are strutting around doing their own things, forming friendships, pursuing new interests, even researching new things, and seeing how their achievements affected those left behind. They achieve immortality through their legacies that others follow and remember.
Ultimately, that's what Life is Big is about. How one achieves immortality, not by literally and physically living forever. Immortality is achieved by the things a person leaves behind: their research, their art, their philosophies, their ideals, their actions, and of course by their friends and family. It's not how and when they died. It's who they affected emotionally and what their lives meant to others.
This theme is prominent in a phrase that is carried throughout the book, a phrase that inspired the title of the book: "Life is Big. Immortality exists, although it doesn't apply to humans (yet)."
This book shows that in a way immortality does exist for humans.
