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

Product Information

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. this a really needed book for me and berliners. specially being also someone living in berlin, some parts are so relatable it hurts, but it also gives a warm feeling that our experience in the city is shared, somewhat similar and we're all trying to make a sense out of it.

In the End, It Was All About Love by Musa Okwonga review

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 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: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. 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...." Its most possible meaning is that it’s about time wasted on trying to build a relationship with a girl who doesn’t want to be with you.

In the End it was all About Love by Musa Okwonga - Royal

The moment that haunts the early part of the book is the one he knows is coming steadily closer, when he passes his father’s age at his death:

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: It’s a special team. The club I play for, the Unicorns, is set up with a specific charter of being anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist. The players are selected on being good at football, but also on being good people. We would have trials and then go for a drink at the pub with all the trialists to see what they’re like. Sometimes brilliant footballers would come to trial but wouldn’t be invited to the squad because they aren’t gentle people.