The gift for the man who has everything used to be antibiotics. But the ashtray wisdom of Seventies stand-up comedy is gathering dust; the preferred present for a growing number of the ultrarich today is eternal life, and so-called biohackers spend as much as $2 million a year in pursuit of it. 

There’s no better time to come across Anders Bodelsen’s Freezing Point. The novel, first published in 1969 and reissued this month by Faber Editions, asks penetrating questions about the terms and conditions of living forever. Freezing Point opens in 1973 and concerns Bruno, a thirty-something fiction editor with no friends and lots of ideas. He spends his days suggesting chaffy crime-thriller plots to his stable of writers. Then he finds a lump on his neck. Cancer, incurable – unless he agrees to be ‘frozen down’ and roused once treatment becomes possible. Just as he resolves to go ahead with the big freeze, he meets a ballerina, Jenny, another driven yet lonely soul. Bruno’s dilemmas only get knottier from this point onwards.

Bodelsen, who died in 2021, is better known for Think of a Number (1968), a thriller whose Rubik’s Cube complexity elevated a genre staple, the bank heist gone awry, into a nuanced drama with moral as well as financial stakes. (It was adapted into a well-received film, The Silent Partner,