“Life is not a zero-sum game. It owes us nothing, and things just happen the way they do. Sometimes, they are fair and everything makes sense; sometimes they’re so unfair we question everything. I pulled the mask off the face of Fate, and all I found beneath it was chance”.
A best seller in Germany, and later translated to English language — “The End of Loneliness” is a novel of death, despair, grief and sorrow of ordinary lives touched by nostalgia, life and death. Jules and his two siblings — Marty and Liz are swallowed into grief when their parents die in a car crash. What follows is a chronicle of hostel life and the subsequent slow unfolding of events over decades. Jules falls in love with Alva — who is a complicated girl going through same journey of broken life. But the “chance” of life has something else in store for them.
The novel follows a series of events which mainly center Jules. It’s a kind of novel in which you don’t look for a purpose or a theme — you are sucked into the life of characters, and you feel everything they are going through. It’s a long letter to life — to ups and downs, grief and sadness of life. Apart from Jules, his sibling — Liz is what sets this family saga apart, she’s a sort of character who gives an insight in to a different dimension of life. Alva and her relationship with Romanov, Marty and his growth as a man. All this combined in a 300-page book will keep you hooked and often searching for tissues. I could feel a little spark of Osamu Dazai style of writing grief and Murakami’s style of narrating a long saga spanning over time. I enjoyed this novel and was left heartbroken in the end.
