[Culture] Book Club: It Lasts Forever and then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken

  • 23/05/2024
  • 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
  • Full Circle House, 89 Ch. de Vleurgat, 1050 Ixelles

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Full Circle Book Club
hosted by Eleonora Balsano

It Lasts Forever and then it's Over
by Paul Lynch

Culture / Thurs 23rd May / 7:30-9 pm

Monthly meet up to discuss a great read, along with drinks & good company


Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, this incredible life-after-death novel asks us to consider how much of our memory, of our bodies, of the world as we know it ― how much of what we love can we lose before we are lost? And then what happens?  This third perspective on myself is disconcerting.  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 bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader’s mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader’s imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anne de Marcken is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. Winner of The Novel Prize, she is also author of the lyric novella, The Accident: An Account, and her writing has been featured in Best New American Voices, Ploughshares, Narrative, Entropy, Glimmer Train, Southern Indiana Review, on NPR’s Selected Shorts and elsewhere. She is an Artist Trust Fellow and recipient of the Howard Frank Mosher Prize for Short Fiction, the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Prize, the Mary C. Mohr Short Fiction Award and the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Award, in addition to numerous jury and audience prizes for her feature film Group. Recent site-specific works include Invisible Ink: Reparations, Invisible Ink: Homeless and The Redaction Project. Her work across disciplines has garnered grant and fellowship support from the Millay Colony, Jentel Foundation, Centrum, Artist Trust and the Hafer Family Foundation. Anne lives with her spouse, fellow artist M Freeman, on the unceded land of the Coast Salish people in Olympia, WA, where she runs the innovative small press The 3rd Thing.

 

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