Red Pill

The narrative flow is good but carried with it is a very well linked network of interlaced motifs from the quotidian personal (which is made anything but in the context of the whole) to the thematic resonances of both a personal and a cultural disintegration. The narrator's deepening dread is Kafkaesque in the face of unknown sources of psychic surveillance and the assault on his naive liberal values: The latter is a reflection of a horror that the growth of Trumpism is the first sign of a powerful new order set to trample such fond illusions as found in a faith in social democracy. What Hari Kunzru does brilliantly is dissolve the boundaries between the (scaced bourgeois) individual psyche and the technocultural onslaught of totalitarianism. The narrator is officially 'mad', having been institutionalised and then released under psychiatric surveillance and that of friends and family. To survive, he must stay quiet about his terrible vision, watch as others channel all their libido into conventional politics, and for him every second is largely given to acting normal. How, in this situation, he wonders, can he protect his wife and daughter from what he is certain is coming? This represents a wish to prioritise a seal around the family and hope for the best. In a chilling reflection of this nexus his (somewhat sinister) therapists suggests he stays well away from politics. The ironic valorisation of 'family values' by all ideologies set on ensuring that people don't get involved before the four walls of their homes is seen here not as a moral virtue but by a vicious imperative.Girdering the novel's narrative arc, one side of the bridge planted in Nazi Germany, the other on the night Trump is elected, there is deep dive into the parallel world of an individual's torments under the East German Stasi. The historical bridge carries to us the bacilli of a will to destroy and dehumanise us. Not a book to read for laughs.

Good writing should stay with you long after you have finished reading. Literature is art, and art is meant to challenge and set our minds to extrapolating. I read this book whilst unwell with gastroenteritis and read it in one sitting, deep into the night.In some ways it is a novel that draws parallels (and contrasts) between dialectical issues of art versus rationality, individuality versus inclusivity, and youth versus experience. The final third of the novel is where it becomes very much disturbing, perhaps because of some of my own life experiences. There appears to be links drawn between the recent global descent into fascism and authoritarianism and the concept of psychosis and significant mental illness about which I am still puzzling over in terms of the whether Kunzru meant this to be metaphorical or is incidental. As I said in the first paragraph literature is meant to make us think and this has certainly set the neurons firing.

A fascinating journey into one man’s desperate attempt to find himself only to better understand his opinion of the world and those who actively encourage it’s destruction; from the evil political stratosphere’s in Germany to the 2016 election in the U.S. A descent into one mans mental state and the unravelling of his life leads us to question what the future holds. Whether it’s related to AI or a simulation on a global scale.

Some books you seek out; some beckon to you but are never pursued; some open up unbidden and you begin to read. Such, for me, was the latter: Hari Kunzru's Red Pill. I was drawn to it by who knows what magnetic power, and once I had started, I read pretty much non-stop until the end. Is it a masterpiece? That is not for me to say; posterity will decide. The book is not seamless in terms of narrative; there are jagged edges, the joints are not dovetailed, there are some palpable dips. But I will say that for such a man as I, at such a time as this, the book reached into my deepest interior and exhumed dread and recognition in equal measure. All my personal anxieties were strikingly on display in the character of the protagonist: the intractable, inexorable process of aging; the lack of ostensible financial success, the ambivalence surrounding family, children, work, manhood; a growing fear of uselessness, of time expiring, of the world (your world) coming to a cataclysmic end - all of this wrapped up in the turmoil of our times, the tectonic shifting of society, technology, the old certainty. How can a man survive, this book seems to ask, who is not a billionaire, whose testosterone is waning, whose pity for others scarcely conceals outright fear for himself? This may be the eternal question, the one that obsessed Chekhov and Bellow and others. An aging and outwardly unsuccessful man has two choices: submission and resignation, or death. That's three, but well. Hari Kunzru does an amazing job of pulling the multiple tails of our benighted (but only to us, the aging and unsuccessful) era into a Rat king of suffocating horror. And there are some wonderful literary quotes (who cares about great lines? I do, for one) that seem to act as tiny beacons of hope in the vast open and turbulent sea of the story. Of course, we must remember that Hari Kunzru is not his hero, but, rather, a very successful novelist. And I am not.

Very good and engaging in places I felt it drifted in others. Wonderful points and advice given. Brilliant done at times

Easily his best novel yet. Truly frightening and insightful, yet 100% entertaining. Finished it all in a burst of several hours this evening. A brilliant examination of where we are now, and how we got here. The weird allure of the modern alt-right/fascist phenomenon for some, the inability of others to counteract it effectively. Some won't like the ending, or may find it a bit too neat, but after the book went from amusing academic farce to full on brainmelt paranoia (with a harrowing section about the Stasi in the 1980s in the middle), I was ready for a ending that was not quite happy but somewhat satisfying.

First of all, let me just make a rare blanket statement without reservation: absolutely everyone should read this book. It is both highly entertaining, and highly necessary.Red Pill unfolds like a triptych. And when I say "unfolds," I mean that close to literally. There is no way in which the first part could possibly prepare you for the second, or the second for the third. And yet, upon turning the final page, and stepping back to view the whole, it yields a terrifyingly cohesive landscape - one which draws stark, unsettling connections between our not-so-distant past, our increasingly worrying present, and the dark future which both portend. I don't want to give too much plot away, as the book's secrets run deep, and its reveals are powerful and hard-won, but rest assured, wherever you think it's going, you're almost certainly in for some surprises.With a sharply focused eye trained on the self-perpetuating inescapability of the surveillance state, Red Pill begins with its nameless narrator - a husband, father, and semi-blocked writer on the precipice of middle age and personal crisis - heading to Wannsee, Germany for a prestigious fellowship at the mysterious Deuter Center - a kind of intellectual compound built around the core tenet of near-total lack of privacy. Expected to eat and work in common areas daily for three solid months, the protagonist withdraws further into himself, taking long walks off the property, bingeing a nihilistic cop show called Blue Lives (which, I'm willing to bet, is more-than-loosely based on The Shield) while shut up in his room, and growing ever more agitated with his fellow fellows (all while continuing to get little to no work done). But you can read all that on the dust jacket. So I'm gonna stop there.As I said above, where Red Pill elevates itself into genius territory is in its big picture observations. The direct lines Kunzru draws between our modern-day, social media panopticon and the minatory watchdogging of Stasi-era Germany are masterful - the way one wrong move can unravel a life; the fast-spreading and deleterious power of guilt by association; the shifting outlets via which hackers and trolls, shaming and doxing, have always existed, in one form or another (and often with far more immediate and brutal consequences than they do even today). Your mileage may vary, but if you're like me, by the end of Red Pill's middle section (narrated by lowkey best character in the book Monika) you'll want to delete every account you've ever had and make your way swiftly off the grid. We may worry about the NSA and the Chinese in the abstract, but our real surveillance state is each other, and always has been. The only thing that's changed is the technology around us.Red Pill's delirious third act revolves around its narrator's descent into paranoid madness after meeting, and getting swept up into a series of fraught misadventures with Anton, the diabolical (or, at least, diabolically detached) creator of Blue Lives. Through his protagonist's escalating agitation and animus toward the man behind his once-beloved police drama, Kunzru poses a daring thesis about the consequences of mass entertainment's constant trend into scotophilia - the way in which our insatiable consumption of entertainment in the streaming era has led to seriousness (or "prestige," if you prefer) being equated with extremity - with topping the last worst thing - and how that has, in turn, infected us all with a darker, more frightened worldview; a kind of low-humming PTSD that, slowly, and very much not-all-at-once, made us, as a society, less inclined to go outside where danger lurks, and more inclined to stay inside where it's safe (and where we can watch more TV). (I for one can certainly recall looking around corners a little more and trusting strangers a little less in the days after a particularly rough episode of Breaking Bad or Mr. Robot) (and indeed, a killer gag near the book's end describes Anton's next show as something very akin to Game of Thrones). All of which is to say, who knows what mainlining all this high-tension programming has done to us long-term?Through Anton, Kunzru posits that the strong, via this not-quite-subliminal messaging, are softening up the weak - keeping them addicted and scared in about equal measure, trapping them in an endless hall of black mirrors, watching tv, watching each other, and feeling forever watched themselves - such that the strong may enjoy the spoils. And in an age when sociopathic zillionaires like the Sacklers and the Mercers (and, yes, Mark Zuckerberg) have already reduced the whole of humanity to breakeven charts, poisoning entire generations and helping to install tyrant puppet Presidents in defense of their bottom lines, well... it's a profoundly compelling argument - one which dovetails perfectly into the heartrending coda of Red Pill's tripartite, Cassandral vision. After three long sections of fiction that feel just speculative enough - or just long-ago enough - to afford you a measure of security and "that could never happen" remove, Kunzru deposits you so abruptly and firmly back into the real world that you'll see every word you just read anew, as frantic and discomfiting fact. This is a book for our times. Maybe THE book for our times. When my wife finished it and handed it to me, she commented that it might be taught in schools one day, and I absolutely see what she meant. My greatest hope for Red Pill is that people will continue to read it and think about it and talk about it, and that somehow, it's not already too late.

O título do romance do inglês Hari Kunzru remete à famosa cena de Matrix, na qual, a escolha da pílula vermelha implica em ver a realidade nua e crua, tal qual ela é. Ou seja, estamos diante de uma narrativa que irá desnudar o mundo diante de nossos olhos. E é isso que ele o faz com uma narrativa situada em 2016, caminhando rumo à inacreditável (para os personagens) eleição Trump.O protagonista-narrador é um escritor americano que vai a Wannsee (que estranhamente soa como “wanna see”) , nos arredores de Berlim, onde se instalará num centro para intelectuais depois de ganhar uma bolsa do local para isso. Cheio de manias e irritado, ele encontra vários problemas no local, mas a narrativa está interessada em sua descida ao inverno com seus olhos abertos para a realidade, então, tomada pela extrema-direita, que ganha força cada vez mais sem que ele perceba.A epígrafe do livro vem de Heinrich von Kleist, escritor romântico alemão que morreu num pacto suicida com sua amada, em Wannsee, e diz que “nenhuma verdade é descoberta aqui na Terra.” O protagonista, que parece ter ido para outro planeta, então, mergulha, a contragosto, num universo da direta alternativa na internet, afundando-se cada vez mais num pântano de conspirações e ódio.Kunzru escreve com sagacidade, e faz uma sátira ao estado das coisas e à boa vontade do intelectual liberal tipicamente americano. A mulher do protagonista é uma advogada que trabalha em causas de direitos humanos pro bono, mas o que irá mudar a vida dele é o encontro com Anton, showrunner de um televisivo policial pelo qual o narrador fica obcecado. Essa figura maligna se revela um predador louco e perigoso, que mostrará um mundo à parte da extrema direita, com um discurso de ódio, levemente velado, mas que se revela em sua completude ao final.Red Pill é um livro que poderia cair facilmente no ridículo em sua tentativa de radiografar o presente, mas Kunzru sabe muito bem como transformar em narrativa ficcional a História de praticamente ontem. Seus personagens são vivos e críveis. Todo mundo conhece, ao menos, meia dúzia de intelectuais como o protagonista, e basta acessar a internet para achar uma infinidade de Antons. Mesmo situado alguns anos atrás esse é um romance que fala sobre o presente, e tem muito a dizer.

I Haven't read the book yet. Its the critical reviews that piqued my interest.The book arrived in perfect shape though. 5 stars for that.

Very strong writing (reminded me of Murakami at times) even with the often arcane Euro-Germanic references and the sometimes incoherent story line. Tries (and I think with some success) to address the Left Wing/Right Wing class war that has infected our society. It is either the best thing I have read in a long time or 300 pages of pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-political delusions of a paranoid lunatic. Not really sure what to make of it overall, but I found it a very absorbing read.

The story begins with a slow pace and picks up somewhere halfway. Its a brilliant piece of writing by the author and I enjoyed reading the book. Recommended.