Musa Okwonga - In The End, It Was All About Love

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My idea was to start off with very universal experiences, like arriving in Berlin – anyone can do that, white, straight, whatever – and you’re reading it, you’re into it, so by the time something happens that is not specific to your experience, you’re already emotionally invested. I wanted to put the reader in a place where they would actually walk a mile in my shoes.

In the End, It Was All About Love (with Musa Okwonga) In the End, It Was All About Love (with Musa Okwonga)

Its most possible meaning is that it’s about time wasted on trying to build a relationship with a girl who doesn’t want to be with you.

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Human love is a special thing, unique in its longevity and the sheer number of beings we are capable of loving. We can love our family, our friends, our lovers. We can also love across the species boundary and the spiritual divide. And as AI romps ahead it may be that one day we can find love with an avatar or robot. Both books are at their hearts journeys to find homes, to find some sort of emotional and psychological settling. In this one, he seeks an easier unburdened place to call home, a restart: The book is divided into small vignette style pieces, all focusing on a different section of the author’s life in Berlin and his past actions in London and Uganda. These range from the importance of therapy, racism, the different types of cakes one finds in Berlin to the minimalist architecture. At times it’s gently humorous, sometimes it poignant. Musa Okwonga is also a poet and there are some poets which also express the author’s feelings about Berlin. Dae-o then hears the news that he’s been exposed online. He’s been made out to be a piece of trash. When Ae-jeong gets into work, she sees her bank book is missing and wonders where Mr Wang is. Dae-o wants the video put down of Ae-jeong at his book concert as he’s worried about her and his daughter. He tells his agent that the rumours are true — he wrote the story without considering Ae-jeong’s feelings. Taking full responsibility

In the End Lyrics | Genius Lyrics Linkin Park – In the End Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

Okwonga was best known to me as a (lyrical) writer on football, notably A Cultured Left Foot: The Eleven Elements Of Footballing Greatness, and he uses football to illustrate the challenges of Berlin's winters, casual racial stereotyping and the offsetting camaradarie of his companions in a piece called 'Running Through the Snow with Unicorns', the Unicorns the name of the local team for which he plays: The world needs to know about the racism in Berlin hidden behind the slogans like "In Berlin kannst du alles sein". Another provoking thoughts like "Berlin is not a bubble", "Berlin is not a grown-up city" are appreciated. The narrator arrives in Berlin, a place famed for its hedonism, to find peace and maybe love; only to discover that the problems which have long haunted him have arrived there too, and are more present than ever. As he approaches his fortieth birthday, nearing the age where his father was killed in a brutal revolution, he drifts through this endlessly addictive and sometimes mystical city, through its slow days and bottomless nights, wondering whether he will ever escape the damage left by his father’s death. With the world as a whole more uncertain, as both the far-right and global temperatures rise at frightening speed, he finds himself fighting a fierce inner battle against his turbulent past, for a future free of his fear of failure, of persecution, and of intimacy. Ha-nee and Dae-o meet. They both ask each other how they are feeling. Ha-nee asks Dae-o to take care of her mother first. This is the scene that confirms that she trusts Dae-o. Dae-o admits that he hated Ae-jeong for a very long time over misunderstandings. Ha-nee says she’s always been happy due to her mother and grandma but that it’s time for Dae-o and her mother to be happy. The level of maturity from this kid is incredible. If this was my child, I’d offer them half of my salary just to maintain this outstanding behavior. Sacrificing the film The story is also told in the second person, a bugbear I know for many readers, but very effective here. As Okwonga has explained he uses the device to make his story, at least initially, universal:this a really needed book for me and berliners. specially being also someone living in berlin, some parts are so relatable it hurts, but it also gives a warm feeling that our experience in the city is shared, somewhat similar and we're all trying to make a sense out of it. There are several stylistic choices that make this book stand out of a crowd. It isn’t a novel, though it does pursue a single character’s development to trace, in some measure, an arc of coming-to-terms. Its episodic structure, offering vignettes of the narrator’s experiences that sometimes build on and refer to each other but are never corralled into a linear narrative, both make for an initially choppy reading experience, and emulate the brief-encounter mode of living that seems to be so characteristic of the narrator’s life in Berlin. Sometimes this left me longing for the connective tissue between the episodes; sometimes it seemed this was perhaps precisely what the narrator was longing for – each episode somehow as lonely an island as he. Maybe it’s time to admit that for a significant number of people romantic love is no longer the ultimate goal, that Valentine’s Day is a commercial invention that has run its course and that we need to embrace all the opportunities for love in our lives to fully experience what it is to be human. It’s time for an inclusive celebration of love rather than an exclusive one. Time for a rebrand. I have a great interest in Berlin, and am also keen to enlarge my reading of authors of colour, so this was a serendipitous find at my local library. Perhaps when ones survival, social standing and acceptance is predicated on coupling up, the obsession with romantic love is understandable. And it will always have a place in the spectrum of love. But we can experience love in so many different ways that we underestimate, even neglect. We are missing out on so much.