Ayo’s Reviews > The End of Everything > Status Update

“You and I go over the past too much. . . If nothing else, it made the past seem like a stationary train accessible from the platform of the present as if you can choose what carriage to enter.

Nothing in memory ever made itself so available.”

Beautiful!!! 😍 ❤️🥰

I LOVED so many things about this strange book. Never read anything like this before!!!

“You can love all you want, possess the world, allow it to possess you. There are no returns from this strategy except what’s immediate. The light will often fall interestingly on the sea for instance and you’ve been lucky with that. But some other things will never happen. “

I love how beautiful the resolve of this dark, bleak, nihilistic book is ❤️😍🥰

“How can you misplace a continent?”

😍❤️😍

Harrison does some interesting things with PoVs in this book I haven’t seen any writer done explicitly. He creates distance and closeness with each 3rd person perspective in the book using pronouns, rigid naming (‘the driver’ instead of ‘it’) and last or first name(Phillip or Tennent), whichever suffices.

It’s confusing but so clever!!! 🔥

“Believe all you like. That at some level unavailable to you, an organizing principle exists . You will never have any evidence of that.”

I NEED to read this book again!!! I’m WOWED!!! How do you even come up with this as a writer??? 😍❤️🥰

“So what is happening? Are we watching a film the universe is showing itself?”

❤️

“You say we are suspended in this new catastrophe. Held in suspension. It’s ongoing and unresolved. It never ends.

The nature of the catastrophe is that it has no nature, not for us. It’s permanent.”

❤️

“We were, all of us, at least in the beginning, thrust back inside ourselves by circumstance, back into the refuge of our humanity.

Because we thought there couldn’t be something outside it. . . “

❤️

This is the classic “I wish I wrote that line” book 😆

“Some people missed one thing from the pre-disaster world. Some people another. Everyone had their favorite.”

❤️

“Since the crisis everyone’s life has been full of moments like this. It has been a long time since anyone can make sense of anything.”

Without offering spoilers -so I start this book and something literally ABSURD happens in the opening chapters. I had to re-read like 6 times. With that event, Harrison didn’t have to tell me the world in this book is morally different from the world I am use to.

GENIUS!!!