Worst. Person. Ever.
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4.1 • 34 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Douglas Coupland's gloriously filthy, side-splittingly funny and unforgettable new novel, his first full-length work of fiction in four years.
Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Raymond Gunt, in the words of the author, "is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id." He's a B-unit cameraman who enters an amusing downward failure spiral that takes him from London to Los Angeles and then on to an obscure island in the Pacific where a major American TV network is shooting a Survivor-style reality show. Along the way, Gunt suffers multiple comas and unjust imprisonment, is forced to reenact the "Angry Dance" from the movie Billy Elliot and finds himself at the centre of a nuclear war. We also meet Raymond's upwardly failing sidekick, Neal, as well as Raymond's ex-wife, Fiona, herself "an atomic bomb of pain."
Even though he really puts the "anti" in anti-hero, you may find Raymond Gunt an oddly likeable character.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Meet Raymond Gunt: the meanest and most narcissistic, debased, and oblivious individual on the face of the planet. Douglas Coupland clearly relished conjuring up this nasty protagonist, whose nonstop rants about everything from American nutrition to Duran Duran are vulgar and wickedly funny. When Ray’s ex-wife gets him a job as a cameraperson on the hit reality show Survival, he embarks on an insane journey to reach the South Pacific island of Kiribati. Not unlike Coupland’s bestselling debut novel, Generation X, Worst. Person. Ever. is essentially a vehicle for him to skewer popular culture. The picture he paints isn’t pretty, but Gunt’s Wiki-like asides about everything from Cinnabon (“the odour of Cinnabon quickly alerts the reptile cortex that one is in the middle of an unpleasant travel experience”) to the British comedy show Mr. Bean (“it can be enjoyed with equal ease by three-year-olds and Alzheimer’s patients”) have an almost transcendent honesty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Raymond Gunt, the narrator of Coupland's (Generation A) latest, is an unemployed cameraman and a horrible human being. He goes begging to his ex-wife Fiona, owner of a West London casting agency. Fi offers him work on the American reality program Survival, and despite his suspicion that she's just trying to embarrass him, Raymond accepts, after which he recruits local homeless man Neal to be his assistant/slave for the shoot. So begins Raymond's vile, tirade-laced adventure to Kiribati, a remote island in the Pacific and the location of the shoot. He is a fabulous monster, with nothing and no one safe from his vitriol. Raymond torments the obese, faces multiple incarcerations, makes leering advances at every woman crossing his path, and plays a role in a potentially globe-threatening nuclear event and all this before even reaching the island. Coupland skewers a pop world's growing insensibilities, and his protagonist is a charming villain whom readers will likely root for, even as he's insulting them.
Customer Reviews
HE'S STILL GOT IT!
Excellent book. We'll written. Harks back to his Gen-X days.
Worst. Writer. Ever.
Don't quit your day job DC ~;D