It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken
 
Mark says "The soft lap of water can be a mournful sound, - it’s the gentle sobbing to the rhythm of grief. It’s this tight rhythm that compels us to read books that can render us completely vulnerable and, when the final page is laid to rest, hollow. Last summer, I read It Lasts Forever and Then it’s Over in one evening, in public, next to the Thames. I surged with an intensity whilst reading it and felt empty when I finished it. It’s a deep discomfort and yet , if we regard this emptiness as the end point of catharsis, maybe we can address what was ever carved out to create a hollow in the heart and a vacuum in the gut. I won't say what this book means to me on a personal level. I will say though, as the summer sun set, the light turned the pages golden and I thought the world owed this book a lot more."
 
The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known—where she loved and was loved.
 
Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. A tale for our dispossessed times, and one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love.
 
Format: Paperback