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Postultimate Postulations

Postultimate Postulations

The World of the End by Ofir Touché Gafla

Written by Ofir Touché Gafla

As a child, and then as a teenager, I used to go to the movies a lot. Cinema, just like literature, has always captured my imagination and played all sorts of tricks on it. I was the terror of the ushers, owing to a strange habit I had developed over the years. Whenever a film ended, and those two daunting words—THE END—would actually spell it out for all to see, something in me rebelled against it. “What do you mean, ‘The End’?” I asked sotto voce. What happens next?

The lights came on, people started shuffling out, and I, the kid who refused to budge, stared dumbfounded at the long list of credits that accompanied the declaration of finality. No way, I thought to myself, unable to fathom the acquiescence of my fellow moviegoers, who left me in the theater while I waited for the next scene. The post-mortem scene, if you like. The usher would clear his throat, probably thinking the pest ogling the credits must have a boom-man for a father or somesuch, and I, in turn, would come up with a conspiracy theory having to do with a secret connection between the usher, the director and the projectionist, that diabolical trio who deprived me, time and time again, of the most interesting scene in the film.

Back then I couldn’t put into words the common knowledge that an end is nothing but a manipulation, and ever since I have fallen prey to a bizarre hobby, which is imagining (or actually) writing the postultimate page, chapter or scene, the page that will eternally remain a secret in the world of the end.

Once I realized that there’s no such thing as an end, but rather “The end, so to speak,” I started exploring the idea, waxing and waning philosophically on its more profound meanings, thoughts which inevitably fueled my novel, The World of The End.

I think there are two kinds of people: People who long for an ending and people who do their best to avoid it. The first say “enough is enough” upon reflecting on their lives, the second quote Peggy Lee’s song, “Is that all there is?” Both crave a sense of relief. The funny thing is the way people define “an end.” When two lovers who have faced innumerable obstacles finally (another problematic word) walk hand in hand toward the sunset, many readers/viewers sigh contentedly. Others reach for a paper-bag and try not to throw up.

Not me. I say, kitsch or no kitsch, this is not the half of it. Who’s to say that five years later Lover X doesn’t kill Lover Y, or that the sunset is but a symbol of the divorce looming in the offing? And what if those two lovers prove me wrong, and live a happy life up until their very last moments? What then? What if, a minute after they died blissfully in each other’s arms, they found out their familiar life had been nothing but an introduction to the real thing? What if the only thing that really ends is the very notion of the end? And what if THE END is just what I have always taken it for, that is to say, the end of something, but not of everything?

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From the Tor/Forge June 17th newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the June 17th Tor/Forge newsletter:

What’s Coming Up for Tor

What’s Coming Up for Tor

Between BEA (Book Expo America), Phoenix Comic Con, and the upcoming San Diego Comic Con and New York Comic Con, we’ve been thinking quite a bit about some of the books we’re excited for this Summer and Fall. So we put together a list of just some of the highlights we have coming up. We hope you’re as excited as we are!

Words of Radiance

Fiddlehead

Thornlost

Watcher of the Dark

Judgement at Proteus

The World of the End

Sea Change

Wisp of a Thing

California Bones

The Eterna Files

Antigoddess

Ender's Game

What are you most looking forward to reading this Summer and Fall?

Starred Reviews: The World of the End by Ofir Touché Gafla

Starred Reviews: The World of the End by Ofir Touché Gafla

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“Gafla creates an interconnected puzzle of living and dead characters and their stories that will shock, amuse, and illuminate the nature of humans and their inevitable end.”

Publishers Weekly

“Simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking, handled with sublime assurance, astonishingly inventive, funny and totally fascinating.”

Kirkus Reviews

The World of the End, by Ofir Touché Gafla, gets starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews!

Here’s the full Publishers Weekly review, from the April 15 issue:

Poster Placeholder of - 55 Poignant and funny, Gafla’s Geffen Award–winning 2005 novel is part romance, part mystery, and part science fantasy. Ben Mendelssohn is a “righter” who specializes in composing perfect endings for books and movies. When his beloved Marian dies “under bizarre aeronautical circumstances,” Ben plans the perfect ending to their romance, killing himself in order to be with her in the afterlife. The Other World is a surprisingly well-ordered place, full of cities of the dead and strange technologies, and managed by the mysterious, almost-human “aliases.” Ben finds a slew of relatives—the Mendelssohns have an extraordinary death rate—but no Marian, so with the help of an eccentric detective of the hereafter he goes on a quest, Orpheus-like, to find her. Gafla creates an interconnected puzzle of living and dead characters and their stories that will shock, amuse, and illuminate the nature of humans and their inevitable end. Agent: Kathleen Anderson, Anderson Literary. (July)

And here’s the full Kirkus review, from the May 1 issue:

Placeholder of  -90 The first appearance in English translation for Gafla’s first novel (2004), and it’s a weird and effective blend of adventure/fantasy, whodunit and romance.

Ben Mendelssohn styles himself an epilogist—he writes endings to stories for people who are unable to. After the death of his beloved wife, Marian, under “bizarre aeronautical circumstances,” inconsolable Ben struggles through another 18 months of existence before putting a bullet through his brain. With thousands of others who died in the same instant, he wakes in the Other World (“We wish you a happy and satisfying death”), an orderly, secular and surpassingly strange realm where sleep and climate can be personally programmed; clothing, money and profit are unknown; and the no-longer-dead are housed in vast cities ordered by the year of the person’s death. Charlatans, people who never lived on Earth, tend forests of family trees and other matters. But of his Marian, there is no sign. Baffled, Ben turns to Samuel Sutton, aka The Mad Hop, a wacky afterlife investigator, for help in locating her. But as Samuel soon, and Ben eventually, grasps, the search is ineluctably interwoven with characters and actions in the world of the living. Born of their mutual fascination with the works of Salman Rushdie, a certain Ormus conducts an electronic romance with Vina. Samuel persuades irascible artist Raphael to paint Marian’s portrait, even though he, Raphael, isn’t dead yet. Ann “Anntipathy,” a nurse who hates people and urges her patients to die, finds herself the recipient of oral sex from Adam, a pedophile and video games designer, whose brother, Shahar, a famous actor, is also a murderer. A talking photograph inserts itself into the plot.

Simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking, handled with sublime assurance, astonishingly inventive, funny and totally fascinating.

The World of the End will be published on June 25th.

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