Red Pill
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- 5,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
‘The book I wish I’d written? Whatever Hari Kunzru is publishing next’ Aravind Adiga
‘Astonishing, absorbing, terrifying. Immensely good.’ Philip Pullman
'‘Red Pill stands as a final blast of sanity against this new, deranged reality. It is a literary masterpiece for a barbaric new world rapidly running out of room for literary masterpieces.’ The Spectator
'[A] deeply intelligent and artfully constructed novel.' Financial Times
From the author of White Tears comes a breathtaking, state-of-the-world novel about one man’s struggle to defend his values and create a reality free from the shadows of the past.
‘From now on when you see something, you’re seeing it because I want you to see it.
When you think of something, it’ll be because I want you to think about it…’
And with those words, the obsession begins.
A writer has left his family in Brooklyn for a three month residency at the Deuter Centre in Berlin, hoping for undisturbed days devoted to artistic absorption.
When nothing goes according to plan, he finds himself holed up in his room watching Blue Lives, a violent cop show with a bleak and merciless worldview. One night at a party he meets Anton, the charismatic creator of the show, and strikes up a conversation.
It is a conversation that leads him on a journey into the heart of moral darkness. A conversation thatthreatens to destroy everything he holds most dear, including his own mind.
Red Pill is a novel about the alt-right, online culture, creativity, sanity and history. It tells the story of the 21st century through the prism of the centuries that preceded it, showing how the darkest chapters of our past haunt our present. More than anything, though, this is a novel about love and how it can endure in a world where everything else seems to have lost all meaning.
Praise for White Tears
‘Exquisitely attuned’ Washington Post
‘Electrifying, subversive and wildly original’ TheNew Yorker
'A book that everyone should be reading right now' TIME Magazine
‘Haunting, doom-drenched, genuinely and viscerally disturbing...’ The Independent
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kunzru's powerful latest (after White Tears) follows an unnamed Brooklyn writer who lands in Berlin for a fellowship at the Deuter Center in 2016. What's supposed to be a writing retreat and a way to get past the creative block he was experiencing amid a midlife crisis, however, soon turns into an escalating disaster. The Center's strict policy that residents share workspace clashes with the writer's need for isolation, driving him to binge-watch Blue Lives, a cop show. Trouble begins when the narrator grows fascinated with the show's persuasive nihilistic worldview, thus triggering his anxiety that his own work is futile and irrelevant. The novel takes a bizarre turn when the paranoid narrator has a chance encounter with the Blue Lives creator, Anton, a smug, alt-right ideologue. Obsessed with confronting Anton about Blue Lives's pernicious message during the increasingly divisive U.S. presidential race, the narrator plows headlong down a self-destructive path. A subplot narrated by a cleaning woman who lives with memories of being controlled by the Stasi doesn't quite tie together with the rest of the goings-on, but Kunzru does an excellent job of layering the atmosphere with fear and disquietude at every turning point. This nightmarish allegory leaves the reader with much to chew on about literature's role in the battleground of ideas.
