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

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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.

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

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. The narrator has left the UK, repelled by the anti-immigration feelings linked to the Brexit vote, for Berlin. Many people will call it that, even those who should know better. It is not a bubble. A bubble is a carefully-sealed world whose occupants are oblivious to everything that happens beyonf: it. Berlin is something different. It is a refuge, an enclave, a safe haven. If Berlin were your bubble then that would mean you were incurious about whatever happened in other parts of the world. But you are acutely aware of those happenings, and that is why you are here. There is a very good chance that you are here because you fled the true bubbles of our societies—the small suburbs and villages where you were raised. where your difference was at best tolerated. There is a very good chance that those places, those bubbles, will resent how you see them now. that they will interpret your distance as elitism and snobbery as opposed to an essential act of self-protection. Those places, those bubbles, will not stop to think about what they did to you, that you were so traumatised that you had to flee at the earliest opportunity. The moment that haunts the early part of the book is the one he knows is coming steadily closer, when he passes his father’s age at his death: Ae-jeong then finds out that Dae-o was leaving without telling her and she’s heartbroken. Dae-o explains that he wants to tell the world their real story but that it will take time. He doesn’t want everyone pitying Ha-nee and Ae-jeong. She tells Dae-o that he can write the real love story without leaving them. Dae-o is worried about people talking and not leaving them alone — he wants to write in solitude. While she fulfills her dream, he will become a new writer. Ae-jeong shares the news with her mother and cries, explaining how heartbroken she is. This really is the last roll of the dice to keep these two apart in the finale — the K-drama series could not help itself. The ending of the finaleAnd finally you are free; in the end, it was all about love ….your vehicle circles round the yard, draws out of the field and indicates to its right, and then begins the slow descent towards Kampala. In The End, It Was All About Love is a powerful novel by Musa Okwonga by poet, journalist, musician and author Musa Okwonga, and published by Rough Trade books. 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: The power of the romantic narrative to drive dating behaviour and commerce is clear but it may also have darker consequences. In 2017 the testimony of 15 women regarding intimate partner violence (IPV) was published. It was clear that one of the issues with IPV was the stories these women had heard about what love was. Love overcomes all obstacles and must be maintained at all costs (even when you’re being abused). Love is about losing control, being swept off your feet, having no say in who you fall for (even if they are violent). Lovers protect each other, fight for each other to the end (even against the authorities who are trying to protect you). It is interesting to contemplate the power of our words. We speak without thinking but the stories we tell our children have consequences. There’s something about the third person that I don’t like. I have always found it jarring and there are very few books utilising this writing which I have liked. Musa Okwonga’s In the End it was All About Love has joined that tiny list.

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

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. Vom Sehen und Gesehenwerden, von Selbstbildern und Selbstzweifeln – Moshtari Hilal schreibt über Hässlichkeit 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.You look at the empty laptop screen before you and the list of new projects next to it, and you can’t be bothered to start. What is the point, you think, of all this writing, all this creating, if at the end there is no-one to stroke your head on the night bus home, no-one’s hand to hold in a darkened cinema, no-one to feed ice cream on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon. What is the point of trying to put joy into the world when you can find none of your own.

In the End, It Was All About Love - Goodreads Books similar to In the End, It Was All About Love - Goodreads

The sense of being a stranger has its roots in childhood, in the aftermath of the vast blast radius of grief (I think here of Elizabeth Bishop): Demographic data shows that the downgrading of romantic love is, to some extent, already happening. Figures from the Office for National Statistics and Relate show that by 2039, one in seven people in the UK will be living alone and today only one in six people believe in “the one”. 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.Which all rather ties up with the author's own biography. Asked in an interview if the novel was auto-fiction, Okwonga laughed and replied "I’d say it’s more like a ‘tall tale’ – can we call it that? Obviously there’s parts of this book that haven’t happened, and characters that don’t exist in real life...." what are you? What have you achieved? You are a writer, making work that is far below his potential. Instead, they can build loving relationships with other people and beings who are capable of fulfilling all their needs. Relationships, science shows us, are underpinned by the same biological and psychological mechanisms and are as beneficial to health and wellbeing as romantic love. Any hierarchy of importance is a cultural construct. We can experience love in so many different ways that we underestimate, even neglect. We are missing out on so much Ha-nee seems content on keeping up to date with the news — she’d rather know what everyone else is saying than not know. She tells her grandmother that the kids have not bullied her over it and actually, they’ve been nice. Ha-nee continues and states that she can tell Dae-o is not a bad man. It’s a special team. The club I play for, the Unicorns, is set up with a specific charter of being anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist. The players are selected on being good at football, but also on being good people. We would have trials and then go for a drink at the pub with all the trialists to see what they’re like. Sometimes brilliant footballers would come to trial but wouldn’t be invited to the squad because they aren’t gentle people.

In The End, It Was All About Love - The Good Literary Agency In The End, It Was All About Love - The Good Literary Agency

In the years since, people would often ask you about Uganda, what it was like, and you would never really know what to say. If you had, you would have told them it was the place which taught you the extremes of joy and pain. And now, for better or worse, you are coming home. 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. 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. Use italics (lyric) and bold (lyric) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song partBoth 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: There is a specific time and date you have been fearing for much of your adult life. When that moment passes, you will be precisely one second older than your father was when he died, and you will have precisely no idea what to do next.

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