THE END OF THE OCEAN | Maja Lunde
READ MAY 2020
This book was read in the original LAX LAB climate fiction book club, which was active between 2020 and 2023. 🕷
THE END OF THE OCEAN |
Maja Lunde
Translated from the Norwegian by Diane Oatley
2019
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
“All life is water, all life was water, everywhere I turned, there was water. It gushed from the sky as rain or snow, it filled the small lakes in the mountains, lay in the form of ice in the glacier, it flowed down the steep mountainsides in thousands of small streams … My whole world was water. The ground, the mountains, the pastures were just tiny islands in that which was already the world. I called my world Earth but thought that it should actually be named Water.”
— Maja Lunde, The End of the Ocean, 2019
It is 2017 when seventy-year old Signe sets off in a sailboat across the ocean in search of her lost love. In 2041, we meet David and his daughter Lou. They are fleeing drought-ridden and war-torn Southern Europe. In a garden in France far from any shore, they discover Signe’s sailboat and personal belongings.
Norwegian author Maja Lunde’s novel The End of the Ocean (Blå for those who prefer to read in the original Norwegian) is a multi-generational story. It weaves together sets of characters and different points in time and imagines a not-so-distant future in which climate change has led to water scarcity and geopolitical instability. Speculative and dystopian, The End of the Ocean is also a call to action.
The End of the Ocean is the second book in Maja Lunde’s ‘Climate Quartet’, a series of independent but linked novels about connection, nature, and climate change.
“The End of the Ocean was written out of gratitude. Being Norwegian means being able to live surrounded by water in any form, wild waterfalls and tranquil lakes, majestic glaciers and pristine snow, and of course the fjords and the ocean. It also means being able to turn on the tap and fill a glass of fresh, clean drinking water. This is a true miracle. But a miracle available to very few, and ever fewer. Our freshwater resources are emptied, the glaciers are melting before our eyes, while the world is getting drier and warmer every year. Therefore, the novel also originates from my own anxiety. In Norway we say ‘write where it burns.’ This is where it burns for me.”
— Maja Lunde, Interview with Amy Brady for The Chicago Review of Books, 2020
About the author
Maja Lunde — author website
Further reading, listening, viewing
‘How your brain stops you from taking climate change seriously’
Nsikan Akpan, PBS, 7 January 2019
'Climate fiction for climate action: An interview with Maja Lunde, author of 'The End of the Ocean'
Amy Brady, The Chicago Review of Books, 21 January 2020
'Greta Thunberg: Humanity has not yet failed' - Reflections from Swedish climate activist Gretha Thunberg, Swedish Radio show Summer on P1, 20 June 2020
‘Meet generation Greta: young climate activists around the world’
Anna Turns, The Guardian, 28 June 2019
Ringer i vannet [Rings in the water] (2020) album by Marte Wulff
Original LAX LAB book cover illustration by Emma Arnold, 2021
