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. 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 Coming up to the age at which his father died, the narrator is having something of a mid-life crisis, his career rewarding intellectually but not financially, failing to find love, and increasingly finding Berlin is not the refuge from racism he has hoped. what are you? What have you achieved? You are a writer, making work that is far below his potential.

In The End, It Was All About Love — Julian Girdham In The End, It Was All About Love — Julian Girdham

Okwonga is actually a highly regarded author in a variety of genres, but part of what he’s interested in here is how little that can seem to count for, spiritually as well as financially. Even so, when the protagonist points out how poorly he was paid for his most successful articles (“not necessarily those which were most widely shared”, he clarifies, “but those which contributed to the national or even global conversation”), it’s hard not to detect at least a batsqueak of humblebrag. 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.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): 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...." 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. 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.

Love? episode 16 recap and breakdown - the finale Was It Love? episode 16 recap and breakdown - the finale

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 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.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: 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. 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 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 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.

In The End, It Was All About Love: A Book review | Alonyo In The End, It Was All About Love: A Book review | Alonyo

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 is a powerful novel by Musa Okwonga by poet, journalist, musician and author Musa Okwonga, and published by Rough Trade books.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 narrator has left the UK, repelled by the anti-immigration feelings linked to the Brexit vote, for Berlin.

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

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. A heartfelt and intimate account of what it is to be human, especially right now. Ha-nee reads the book “Love is Nonexistent” and ponders over the claims that it is fake and the implied truth that Dae-o abandoned Ae-jeong and her child. She speaks to her mother and tells her that everyone online is saying the novel is fake and that she knows the woman is based on her. Of course, Ms Song is the orchestrator of all of this. This is one last throw of the dice to stop Ae-jeong and Dae-o from concluding their relationship but it’s obvious it isn’t going to work. Episode 16 is going through the motions. It’s true 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 finale 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: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 part, writing my book was driven by a desire, born of a decade of research, to get us to re-engage with and celebrate the different types of love in our lives. All forms of love carry the same joys and benefits as romantic love. In some cases, such as with our best friends, the love we have for them can be more emotionally intimate and less stress inducing than any we have with a lover.