It was my love of literature that inspired this ongoing project, in which I asked international authors living in Berlin to meditate on the last lines of their books. Alongside stirring anecdotes, their responses offer a compelling glimpse into an artist’s creative process.
Slowly her body will learn its new, sad strength.
Aris Fioretos The sentence came to me about a third of the way into the text. I knew at once it would be the last one. It still stands at the end of the book on which I have been working for the past couple of years. The distance to it has grown shorter. I can now make out the sentence ahead of me. What it means? The thirty white pages that still remain to be traversed will know.
When I looked around, the traffic light was red, and the woman was gone, as if she had dissolved into air, and I thought, she was right, I come back here too often; yes, exactly: a little too often.
Katja Petrowskaja The final chapter involves a return to the hometown, but you don’t know precisely if this return occurs in terms of language, relationships, or topography, and how real this return is. The encounter with the unknown older woman in fact took place on Institutskaja Street, as I stood in front of my birthplace again, in my hometown of Kiev. The woman told me that I came here too often, although I hadn’t been there for years. Did she know that I was writing a book about my origins? But reality has, in turn, overtaken us. Just as I finished the book, nearly 100 people were killed during the slaughter on that street in Kiev, and now I really know why I was there “too often.”
But there were no snipers, as there are for hands that reach out of the ghettos;
no dogs, as for hands that reach out from the cracks in boxcar floors;
no angels waiting, as they always do, for hands that reach out from chimneys into ash-clouded skies.
Nathan Englander I worked on a story called The Tumblers for years and years, drafting and redrafting, again and again. I worked on it so intensely for so long, that I couldn’t see it straight anymore when beginning at the beginning and writing toward the end. Then I had the idea of writing it backwards. I began drafting at the end of the story, and, bit by bit, worked my way to the front, which gave me the distance I needed to see it clearly again. So it’s the one story I wrote where the first sentence turned into the last.
It will rain today.
Habila Helon This is the last sentence to my second novel Measuring Time. It is a rather dark novel and I wanted to end it on a positive note, but not gratuitously so. There has been a drought in the small town of Keti; as a reflection of this drought the main character, Mamo, has gone through a harrowing time: there are deaths in the family, his lover is losing her mind. The sentence shows Mamo’s determination to put the worst behind; an act of will. And so whether it rains or not is not important, what is important is that he is determined to move on, to welcome life.
14.45. I open my rucksack, remove the manuscript, put it in an empty envelope; and seal it.
Abbas Khider I know the last sentence before the story has been written. It’s like an undertow, pulling the story onto the paper.
I stood in that small room and wept into the desert of my palms.
lê thi diem thúy Palm is one of my favorite chapters. It was the most difficult chapter for me to write. The last sentence came to me first. I didn't know what it meant, or who was speaking it, or where - in the narrative arc - the sentence was coming from. When that chapter finally came together - after many, many drafts, and one attempt to toss it out entirely - I felt spent, and so grateful.
The descendants of Katharina’s and Maria Theresia’s guests return to their ancestors’ homeland and hope that their existence will no longer be threatened by a war.
György Dalos I just finished my book History of the German Russians, knowing full well that books have an end, but history has none.
I will walk without noise, and I will open the door in darkness, and I will
Jonathan Safran Foer This last sentence of my first book isn't even a sentence, as it ends without punctuation. In one American paperback edition, this final non-sentence was somehow, accidentally, left out, so that the book ends with an actual sentence. When I see that final page, I think, "But it's incomplete. Because it's complete." Any complete book is incomplete.