So far, astounding. I’m about three quarters of the way through this one.
From the publisher:
Co-winner of the Novel Prize, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over asks how much of yourself can you lose before you are lost… and then what happens? The heroine of this haunting, spare novel is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, our undead narrator notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. She has forgotten even her name, but she remembers with unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known — where she loved and was loved. She heads west and into mind-boggling adventures, carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest.
My brain connects this one as much with the desperate vastness and slow-moving, bloody sadness of movie Mekong River Hotel by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul as it does with books Pure Colour by Sheila Heti or The Seventh Mansion by Maryse Meijer.
I have a solitary issue with this book: the author constantly concludes paragraphs with terse catch-all phrases, faux-philosophical quandaries backed by vague time realtors (I looked this up, that kind of word is called an “adverb of frequency” in real life, I guess). “Sometimes I think the world is better now.” “You always said I was inconsolable.” “I will never eat again.” Bugs me. But otherwise, I think this one is quite marvelous and I’m happy the holy trinity of New Directions, Fitzcarraldo, Giramondo gave it a chance.
Booklots! 