Review: It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over - Anne De Marcken

Genre: Literary Fiction Novella, Magical Realism, Post-apocalyptic.

Published: New Directions (US)/ Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), March 2024 My Rating: 1/5 stars

"That was the future. This is now. The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same."

I wanted to love this novella so bad. A magical realism story of an undead woman, tracking across a desolate landscape with a crow living inside her chest, exploring the grief of the life she once lived. It sounded like Grief Is the Thing with Feathers meets One Yellow Eye. In other words: the exact kind of allegorical weirdness that could love… It was not…

The Good:

Part one felt introspective and inspired. A bit pretentious, but it had me hopeful. I’m a sucker for the themes that it explores: grief, loneliness, how one continues on after their world has ended (literally or metaphorically through a large loss or trauma). I even loved the metaphors used to convey them. The hunger, the undead-state, the literal loss of limbs and falling apart of the body, and the crow in our protagonists chest. Very Ted Hughes/Max Porter; I see what you did there Anne.

There were even a few lines that truly struck hard for me, and felt like they belonged in a book I adore. There's a line in particular that gutted me, but since it's a slight spoiler I won't quote it here. You can check out my Goodreads-review and open up the spoilersection if you're curious and don't mind spoilers.

Unfortunately, these lines were buried among so much empty fluff, that it was too little too late for me.

The Bad:

In short: I felt like de Marcken got lost in her own stylistic choices. This book was one of the most gratingly pretentious pieces of literature I’ve read this year. It uses a lot of big words and stylistic bombast, whilst simultaneously seeming to have no clue what it actually wants to communicate.

The writing style is stream-of-consciousness to the extreme. As such, it often meanders repetitiously around great ideas without actually arriving anywhere meaningful. Adding to my annoyance, is the fact that all of this is presented as if it is supposed to be deep and meaningful.

The result is an absolutely baffling constellation of words put to paper… I’m glad that many readers did divine some deep and emotional meaning from it, but to me, (pardon the “constellation-pun”) that felt more like practicing astrology on the words. A.k.a.: seeking meaning into something so vague and abstract, that you can basically pin to it whatever you want.

I could quote various passages to illustrate what I mean, but I feel like this piece of dialogue fits best:

I say “why is the moon always full?”

Marguerite says, “what is it filled with?”

“Hunger?” I say.

“Grief” she says.

I want to hold the crow in my arms.

I say, “I’m not going to eat anymore. What I mean is that I will no longer eat.”

Marguerite says, “I’m going to leave”.

“Where are you going?” I say.

“Home”, she says.

“Where is home?”

“Home is like the moon” she says.

“Filled with grief?”

“Never where you expect it.”

Apart from the fact that no 2 humans have ever spoken like this to one-another, this entire passage sounds deep, but is utterly meaningless. There’s a difference between being up for interpretation and feeling like the author wasn’t quite sure herself of what the meaning was supposed to be.

This was the literary equivalent of “you will overcome challenges and seek new fortune when Mercury is in retrograde”…

I'm glad this book worked for many people, and a little gutted that I wasn't one of them. I may need to reread Grief is the Thing with Feathers for the millionth time to comfort myself after this one.

You can find this book here on Goodreads.