Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - Red Pill

Reviews tagging 'Mental illness'

Red Pill by Hari Kunzru

4 reviews

gusanadelibros's review against another edition

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dark sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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dkhbrgr's review

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

would love to read more from Kunzru, his writing is sharp & smart & on the nose. i was sucked in from the first few pages, felt the middle was a little clunky, but he had me again by the end. this book captures the anxieties of the current historical moment in uncomfortable and moving ways.

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flying_monkey's review

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challenging dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Hari Kuzru is one of my favourite contemporary writers and his last novel, White Tears, was the Get Out of literary fiction. Red Pill deals with similarly contemporary issues, but it's set very specifically in 2016 in the run-up to the election of Donald Trump, although this doesn't become signficant until near the end of the book.

The protagonist is a poor Kunzru substitute, Gary Bridgeman, an aimless British-Indian writer (not of the same level as Kunzru) transplanted to New York, with a lovely and brilliant Japanese wife, Rei, and 3-year old daughter, Nina. Due to some limited success with a popular book on aesthetics, he is offered a 3-month residency by an eccentric German oganisation, the Deuter Foundation, located in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, just across the lake from the house where the Nazis developed the Final Solution. Like me, Gary is already obsessed with surveillance and privacy and somewhat paranoid, and it turns out that the foundation has completely the opposite views and expects its fellows to work completely transparently and engage with the other resident fellows. Needless to say, Gary reacts badly and retreats into his room and then tries to escape into the local area and the centre of Berlin. He encounters Syrian refugees and ex-Stasi informers, but most fatefully of all, Anton, a mephistophelean white supremacist who happens to be the showrunner of a TV show Gary is obsessed with, a truly horrific police drama called Blue Lives (and yes, you can't help adding the 'Matter' at the end). From here things go very badly wrong for Gary.

Red Pill is another beautifully written and genuinely disturbing novel from Kunzru, but I can't help feeling, coming out as it does as Trump is on his way out, that it feels much more temporally specific and maybe even dated, than White Tears. There is a lot going on and some of it feels forced, and certainly the story of the Stasi informer reads so much like an outtake from or a riff off Anna Funder's brilliant book, Stasiland, I was surprised not to see her name in the acknowledgements. It's still head and shoulders above most other things I've read this year.

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encgolsen's review

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challenging dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

When the narrator of Red Pill is awarded a stipend to write at the Deuter Center near Berlin, he has no idea his stay will lead him down a rabbit hole of conspiracy that will threaten to unravel his life. The Deuter Center's rules about transparency and openness create a stubbornly contrary reaction in him; he retreats into escapism, absorbed in a garishly violent cop show called Blue Lives, which takes on increasing significance when he meets the show's creator at a charity event in Berlin. That's when things really start to spiral out of control. Concluding with the 2016 US presidential election, Red Pill brilliantly captures the anxiety of an uncertain age, the fear that something terrible is coming, that poison is seeping into the cultural ecosystem unrecognized and unopposed, even as sea levels and temperatures rise. I would not recommend reading this book if you're prone to existential crisis; at least wait until the results of the next election are in.

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