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If Berlin were your bubble then that would mean you were incurious about whatever happened in other parts of the world. If you have a relationship to Berlin, you may find it vividly bringing to life certain city scenes that seem vaguely familiar – though it speaks of beers in cosy bars that have by now also begun to seem eerily distant. Yes, the earnestness did sometimes leave me feeling browbeaten into suppressing doubts over the precise value added by the modishly autofictional form. The book follows the narrator as he lives a mostly untethered life as a Black, British man living in Berlin (that raucous teenager).
In The End, It Was All About Love - Musa Okwonga - Google Books
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. 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. The reflections on his own intersectionality (being a black man, bisexual, and an immigrant in Western Europe) are interwoven with the joys and worries of daily life in a way that makes it so relatable and engaging. There is the loneliness of a man who worries he will never find someone to share his life with, and the growing hopelessness of too many failed attempts. Added pain comes from the fact that he is about to turn 40 – the age at which his father died in a helicopter crash during the civil war in 80s Uganda.
Human love is a special thing, unique in its longevity and the sheer number of beings we are capable of loving.
Musa Okwonga - In The End, It Was All About Love
Though evidently the ‘you’ of the narrator occupies a positionality different from my own – he is a Black, British, bisexual man, rather keen on soccer – I felt invited in by the use of the second person pronoun to experience the world, in rather stark intimacy, through his eyes. 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. And there were one or two things, small things, huge things, that I do know well, and to read of those aspects of being human in these words left me breathless.I don't really want to critcise this as the author has clearly poured his life blood into this, but it just wasn't the book for me. p>
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