Name: smile??'s review of It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken
Item: It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
Rating: 5
Author: smile??

Anne de Marcken

Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, this incredible life-after-death novel asks us to consider how much of our memory, of our bodies, of the world as we know it -- how much of what we love can we lose before we are lost? And then what happens?

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

rain

It is pointless to wish I had the hunger back instead of this endless grief.

I leave the garden behind the house behind the house. The apple tree and plum tree are bare as the old women we will not be together. They hold each other.

That is what ritual does. It excuses us. Comforts us. Places us in a context so vast and ineffable we can confuse it with truth because it is impersonal and because it has a lineage and because it extends all the way – but only – to the limits of what we can conceive.

smile??

I am in the ocean. I am on the shore. I am trying to remember or to see.

The sun sets. I watch it go. it sinks very quickly and I'm not ready for it to be gone. Just before it goes, it slows. The last moment is long and sudden. The next moment is vast and loud. The sky and the waves. Then just after everything is over, it isn't. The curved red bite of the sun's edge emerges again below the horizon because the horizon is not the horizon after all but only a band of clouds. Between it and the sea, there is a gap of sky, narrow and pearl pale.

It is as if I am watching from here as the sun rises on some other continent, watching the beginning of some other person's day on the far side of a world I have misunderstood until this moment, thinking the sky is overhead, that I know rise from set, beginning from end.

At one point the sun is sinking both in and out of view and seems to not be sinking at all, but standing still. By the time it finally sets, I expect to see it again. I wait, but this time it is really gone.

The end of the world happens so quietly. Things as large as glaciers are so quiet.

I wanted to grieve while I still had the solace of you.

I used to imagine how it would be after you died. The way my days would go. [...] 

I realize now that when I was playing these silent movies of life after our life, you were still there. You were sitting with me, the two of us alone in the theater, still together. This sadness is not an empty church and not an empty house. It is the whole empty world and I am in it and it is in me.

No beach pines. No dune grass. No dunes. No sign that we were ever here. No here where we ever were.

I wonder what direction I am facing, if beyond those hills is the ocean, the dunes, the memory of you.

Is hunger, is rage, the attachment to one's own form? Is grief surrender?

How small or altered or distance must a part of us be before it stops being a part of us? Does it ever?

We wanted more of each other and more life. We were adding on a baby to the house of our love. Like a sunroom, but made of wonder and fear and time and denial. It was the future. We pictured ourselves living there. All the imaginary firsts and the world going on as if it weren't already too late. It wasn't really as if the baby died. It wasn't even a baby, really. Not yet. I don't even like to use the word and wish there were a good alternative. It was more like the future died. It became part of the past.

What is unbearable is already too much. How can there be more?

I think, if I am in the place where we were together, then we are together again.

I pretended everything would be okay because it seemed impossible to always be saying goodbye. To blueberries. To the ocean. To ravens. To pelicans and plovers. To the cormorants. To the sunlight on the living room wall at four o'clock. To the sound of you in the next room.

I wish that I had opened my eyes. I wish that I had turned from the window and looked at you in that moment when you were looking at me. This world slipped by me.

It feels like a waste. It feels like a tithe. It feels like how this place will be without us.

It is unbearable to look back from the future we did not know we had been traveling toward. That is not right. It is unbearable because we did not know. It was plain as our palms.

I think of all the time I spent deciding. imagine what I missed. My whole life. I know again that I missed it all with you. Almost all of it. It's always so bad when I realize this again. But it is also always when I love you most. The sick kick in my stomach and the time-lapse bloom of something like my heart go together now.

We hold things in our bodies. The earth holds things in its body. In clay. In ice. The real. The unreal. Time. Each other. All the chances we had.

lowkey reminded me of lispector's works and a leopard skin hat,, meta but not really ??? this was insane.

Nica

3.8

oh wow ... i have no words.

lowkey reminded me of lispector's works and a leopard skin hat,, meta but not really ??? this was insane.

 becoming a self-aware, undying zombie who can’t help but remember what she forgets, be drawn to an intangible past, and forced to keep moving to a future of emptiness. Already armless, heartless, memory-less, crow-less, headless, what does one do when the only thing that drives you, the need to satiate a never-ending, gnawing hunger (which is just another term for grief), is also taken away along the way?

There is no better way to tell a story about grief than through a poetic prose, full of yearning, dismemberment, and horror, which all leads to the belly of the gentlest monster there is.

frances

[borrowed from the library]

New fear unlocked: becoming a self-aware, undying zombie who can’t help but remember what she forgets, be drawn to an intangible past, and forced to keep moving to a future of emptiness. Already armless, heartless, memory-less, crow-less, headless, what does one do when the only thing that drives you, the need to satiate a never-ending, gnawing hunger (which is just another term for grief), is also taken away along the way?

There is no better way to tell a story about grief than through a poetic prose, full of yearning, dismemberment, and horror, which all leads to the belly of the gentlest monster there is.

- a book pretending to be about the zombie apocalypse and actually about grief. a funny oxymoron: this book is so focused on telling a story about the undead, and yet few books out there teach more than this one about what it means to be human

- unspeakably well written, and pulls emotions and memories out of me i didn't know were still lingering by the door

- the most heart-wrenching ending of any book i've ever read... felt like every paragraph was eating away at my soul

- this book has quite a lot in common with 

 by clarice lispector. with the talks of time and living and dying and looking back on someone, this "you" that the narrator loved and lost. if you're a fan of clarice, this would be the first non-clarice book i would recommend to you

- it's also worth noting that this book does take a stance opposite to that of àgua viva with time. you finish àgua viva, close the book, and feel like the entire narration happened within no time at all, the ephemeral "instant" that clarice spends the whole book aiming to achieve. it lasts forever, however, takes that same present and makes it last a century, stretching a sunset into an eternity

the end of the world happens so quietly. things as large as glaciers are so quiet.

- a book pretending to be about the zombie apocalypse and actually about grief. a funny oxymoron: this book is so focused on telling a story about the undead, and yet few books out there teach more than this one about what it means to be human

- unspeakably well written, and pulls emotions and memories out of me i didn't know were still lingering by the door

- the most heart-wrenching ending of any book i've ever read... felt like every paragraph was eating away at my soul

- this book has quite a lot in common with àgua viva by clarice lispector. with the talks of time and living and dying and looking back on someone, this "you" that the narrator loved and lost. if you're a fan of clarice, this would be the first non-clarice book i would recommend to you

- it's also worth noting that this book does take a stance opposite to that of àgua viva with time. you finish àgua viva, close the book, and feel like the entire narration happened within no time at all, the ephemeral "instant" that clarice spends the whole book aiming to achieve. it lasts forever, however, takes that same present and makes it last a century, stretching a sunset into an eternity

- the end of the world happens so quietly. things as large as glaciers are so quiet.

yasi

could I ever have guessed that a novel about the undead & the apocalypse would make it to my personal canon? no—but marcken's it lasts forever & then it's over is an unbelievably eloquent and disarming novel (if you can even call it that; this text is very much in the world of nelson's bluets) that gouges into the wound of grief, memory, and everything else that is strange, painful, and beautiful about being alive/dead/undead. breathtaking and elliptical, it lasts forever is a love letter to the metaphor and what language can move in the body when pushed beyond the limits of the page; so many moments in this short text marcken managed to crawl under my skin and straight into the hollow of my chest (I'm saying, yes, I cried to a zombie novel). I never want to read another novel that claims to be genre-bending or experimental if it does not do what marcken managed to do in 127 pages. shocking

biddy

really beautiful and absurd reflection on grief albeit a little tough to digest at points! but really beautifully written, i felt the yearn! 

Nat Wong

"It is not what Mitchem says or what Marguerite says. Not nothing. Not real or unreal. It is not simple emptiness. Not lack. Not want. Not hunger. It is not hunger. It is grief."

This book isn't about zombies or the apocalypse.

At first, I didn’t know what to think of It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. It slipped past me, or rather, I passed through it, like walking through fog that’s made of breath and something unnamed. The language—yes, language more than plot—is abstract, but not empty. It disappears mid-sentence, something remembered just before forgetting.

As I read, I was struck, gently and suddenly, by its fragmented intimacy, the way it speaks in half-formed truths, the way it trusts silence more than conclusion. And yet, I found myself watching it from the outside, sometimes. Not entering, only observing. Like pressing my hand to a window warmed by sun, but not feeling the sun itself.

To read this book is to read with your skin, not your eyes. You have to be in a particular state: a pause between griefs, a blue hour when nothing insists on sense. Because its ache, so soft and unassuming, will otherwise drift past unnoticed. It whispers, and if you’re not already listening for something lost, something broken, you might not hear it at all.

Finally, this is a book shaped like grief—quiet, disorienting, impossible to hold all at once. Not dramatic, not explosive. Just that slow, accumulating ache. The kind that drifts in behind ordinary things, a cup, a gesture, a name you used to hear with love. It is poignant. And distant. And maybe that’s 

Rien

"It is not what Mitchem says or what Marguerite says. Not nothing. Not real or unreal. It is not simple emptiness. Not lack. Not want. Not hunger. It is not hunger. It is grief."

This book isn't about zombies or the apocalypse.

At first, I didn’t know what to think of It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. It slipped past me, or rather, I passed through it, like walking through fog that’s made of breath and something unnamed. The language—yes, language more than plot—is abstract, but not empty. It disappears mid-sentence, something remembered just before forgetting.

As I read, I was struck, gently and suddenly, by its fragmented intimacy, the way it speaks in half-formed truths, the way it trusts silence more than conclusion. And yet, I found myself watching it from the outside, sometimes. Not entering, only observing. Like pressing my hand to a window warmed by sun, but not feeling the sun itself.

To read this book is to read with your skin, not your eyes. You have to be in a particular state: a pause between griefs, a blue hour when nothing insists on sense. Because its ache, so soft and unassuming, will otherwise drift past unnoticed. It whispers, and if you’re not already listening for something lost, something broken, you might not hear it at all.

Finally, this is a book shaped like grief—quiet, disorienting, impossible to hold all at once. Not dramatic, not explosive. Just that slow, accumulating ache. The kind that drifts in behind ordinary things, a cup, a gesture, a name you used to hear with love. It is poignant. And distant. And maybe that’s 

the point.

"The space between me and me is you. This is a mystery."

trin

“How small or altered or distant must a part of us be before it stops being a part of us? Does it ever?” / “I hold the crow in my hand. Do I have to let you go? Even you?”

shen

reread (2025)

“How small or altered or distant must a part of us be before it stops being a part of us? Does it ever?” / “I hold the crow in my hand. Do I have to let you go? Even you?”


a slow start with an amazing ending. an eclectic look at overwhelming grief. 

Grace M

Olivia

Diana Sawyer

Naïa

Brodie smith

Lauren Robinson

jackie

Rachel Livingston

Karmen 

Alithea

rory

ella

I stay in bed all day. If I lie on my right side, I can keep the arm balanced as if it is still part of me. Or I can pretend it is your arm and that you are in bed with me. I think about how we used to take a blanket into the dunes and wrap up together. Wake with sand in our hair and in the corners of our eyes. Sound of the ocean as big as the sky. I miss sleep. I miss you.

We are character actors to ourselves—people we recognize but can't name.

I don't miss my name and I haven't bothered to replace it. I miss your name. I'm sorry, but I have forgotten it, too. I don't look for it on the walls. The thought that I might read it and pass it by, just go on to the next name, is terrible. Like meeting you in another life and failing to recognize you.

If I ever remember your name, how will I know it was really your name?

Perhaps the chief difference between me now and me then is my tolerance for terror. I think this has to be related to the abstraction of pain. Physical pain. Emotional pain. The pain of others. My own. The flinch is still there.

If you were here, you would tell me that you would have fallen in love with me no matter when we met. Even when I was a horse, you would say. Even now, you would say. Even now you would fall in love with me.

I miss the way we retold each other the same stories as if we'd just remembered them. And the way we'd play along, asking questions to get at the details we already knew. I think it was so we would still recognize each other even as we changed. [...] But now we are just the stories. You. Me. All of us. Just the raspy husk of ourselves. Mitchem says this is another way we're superior—because we are, at the same time, creator and creation.

There is more to say about the crow, but I don't know how to say it. I don't know why it is so hard. Like a confession. How do you confess? I kept the crow. I have it now. I wanted it. Not to eat. But terribly. I wanted it. Not sexually, but like that. It was that powerful. And terrible-seeming. The moment you realize you want something that is not yours. The moment you let yourself have it. I took it to my room and lay down on top of it, the crow. I just lay there with it under my chest. If I were living, my heart would have been pounding right where the crow was pressed between me and the carpet. I keep thinking about its black feathers. Its thin legs and clenched feet. I'm thinking about them now. I want to hold the crow in both hands and I only have the one and that seems like the whole truth of everything. 

I have a crow inside me and no one can know. I can feel it all the time. It is like the entire night sky and all the stars and every beautiful sound you can imagine. It is like being too excited to sleep. It is like being twelve years old and stripping off my clothes outside in the rain. Savage. Girl. Suddenly awake to the deviance available in every ordinary moment. The possibilities of my current situation had not occurred to me before now. The freedom. There is a crow in my chest.

There are no more three-day-long days. That feeling of abundance depended not upon excess and not scarcity, but finitude and a kind of thrift. It had to do with there being only so much time in the day but still more than just enough and using up every ounce of it, not wasting a moment. But to be undead is to be superfluous, perpetual. The moon is always full. We dream without sleeping. We refuse to return to the earth. Hunger is relentless. 

Each time, just before the recording starts again, there is a hesitation in the flow of particles through space. A moment when I can hear the open line and I think it will be you there in that blankness. 

Emptiness spills into me. My ear is the Panama Canal connecting two oceans of emptiness. The emptiness out there and an emptiness in me. 

I feel it inside me. The static blankness of my arrested cells and the uncertain space between them. The gap between one blink of memory and another. The interval that is relationship. The body of the crow in the body of me. The black hole that is sucking me inside out, the utter unutterableness that I never entered when I was alive.

It is not what Mitchem says or what Marguerite says. Not nothing. Not real or unreal. It is not simple emptiness. Not lack. Not want. Not hunger. It is not hunger. It is grief.

We are just like the living. Hunger is only ravenous hope. [...] There is no bottom to this well. No dark place to wait it out. Nothing will ever touch this craving for you.

Looking at her body is like looking at your face asleep. So unguarded and fierce. I will not see you grow old.

How can we bear more of what is already unbearable.

 the end. But we did not know it then. You do not know the end has happened until later. Or you do not admit it. Looking back, you can see it. And you realize that all the time after that was just an effort to keep going as if it weren't already over.

I was a zombie even then. Ravenous eater of a world that was already the last of its kind.

Everything I encounter has the quality of having been encountered before. An always already feeling. And at the same time, everything I encounter is strange to me. 

Have I been here with you? Did we come this way?

What is familiar because I have seen it before and what is just part of a familiar story? What is remembered and what is received? What is strange because I have forgotten it, or because it is new, or because this time I am on foot, or because t his time I am undead, or because this time I am without you?

smile?? &
It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken

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It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken