Reviews with content warning for Racism - Red Pill

Reviews tagging 'Racism'

Red Pill by Hari Kunzru

5 reviews

charlma's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

4.0

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miagw962's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

The you was me. Me in particular. I too would fall into silence. I would die.

This book was endlessly intriguing! So many interesting and, quite frankly, disturbing ideas portrayed in a semi-realistic way. The whole thing really reminded me of the film Get Out where you know the whole time something isn't right, and then it is revealed that the antagonists have some sort of white supremacist agenda. Genuinely a super interesting book - the way it ended up connecting to real things that were happening in society is what was the scariest part. Definitely such an important conversation presented in a very disconcerting way. Sometimes I found it hard to follow the story but I ended up really enjoying some of the vignettes aside from the main story. It was also good to hear the audiobook read by the author, he provided a very personal perspective which I also think is important.

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nanabee23's review

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

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

3.5

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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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