Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and then It’s Over is the third winner of the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, continuing the award’s tradition of sticking to shorter works (I’d call this a novella at 125 pages) as well as keeping the prize exclusive to women authors. It’s the strangest winner so far, both in concept and in theme, as it’s a strange and, to me, almost inscrutable meditation on death and grief. I still don’t know if I liked it.

The narrator and protagonist of It Lasts Forever has no name, and doesn’t even remember her name, because she’s dead, or more specifically she’s undead, a zombie moving through a post-apocalyptic world where there are some living people left, just not many, and the undead retain some of their pre-zombification consciousness. The narrator is grieving the loss of her life, as well as her partner, whose name she also doesn’t remember, and whose absence is like a hole in her existence, not to be confused the literal holes in her existence like the one that happens at the beginning when her arm falls off. She also later takes a dead crow and binds it into a lacuna in her chest, talking to the crow and believing it is answering her with trios of seemingly unrelated words. The novella follows her on a journey of sorts, through a sort of zombie encampment, with at least one murder along the way and a long introspection on whether she’s actually hungry (no “BRAINSSSS” here, fortunately) and what it means for her undeath if the hunger is gone. Where she’s going isn’t clear even when she gets there.

De Marcken writes with an ambiguity that drives me a bit mad, because there is so little on which my brain can anchor to get a hold of the scene. She describes almost no one, and does little more to describe any of the environs. The protagonist has no name. The entire novella is an inner monologue by our host zombie as she tries to remember some of the things she’s forgotten and wonders what it means to be undead and how to navigate this in-between sort of grief she’s experiencing.

That last bit is, I think, the key to It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, although I’m far from certain on this one. The narrator’s status in zombie purgatory is a metaphor for the fog of grief, when despair and loss and the finality of it all cloud your judgment and your memory, tingeing every day with enough gray to disorient you and make you forget where you were going or why you got out of bed in the morning. She – I believe she’s a she, but I actually am not 100% sure any more – drifts from place to place without a clear sense of purpose, or even a clear sense of place. The whole story kicks off with her arm falling off, which I suppose happens when you’re unalive, and her response even to that is a big meh. If this is the brochure for being undead, I’ll pass, thanks.

I’ve read three of the finalists for this year’s Le Guin Prize, including this one, Some Desperate Glory, and the book I read right after this one, Orbital, winner of this year’s Booker Prize for fiction (after I’d put in a hold at the library for it, you have to take the small victories as they come). I think I’d rank this third, as it is just so slight, and I think its best attribute is the one I tend to value least, the quality of its prose. It is poetical, not exactly poetic; it reminds me of a professor I heard in college for a single lecture, who played Jethro Tull’s “Bouree” and pointed out that it is jazzy, but it is not jazz. It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over left me quite unsated. I wanted more, and I finished wondering what exactly I had just consumed.

Next up: I’m a few books behind, but I read Orbital after this one, and am now reading Cédric Villani’s Birth of a Theorem.