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Blue Ruin
From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty, power, and capital’s influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it.
Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height—the greater public panicked in quarantine—and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn’t recovered from the effects of a recent Covid case.
When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won’t recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion.
Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind.
Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height—the greater public panicked in quarantine—and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn’t recovered from the effects of a recent Covid case.
When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won’t recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion.
Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind.
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First published May 14, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 452 reviews
May 27, 2024
For a Kunzru, this is more on the accessible side, but I love how this can be read in context with The Map and the Territory, which is my favorite Michel Houellebecq: "Blue Ruin" is told by Jason "Jay" Gates, a Black British performance artist who was once a rising star in the London scene, but now lives in his car and delivers food in the Corona-stricken USA. One day, he brings supplies to a rather remote mansion, where his ex Alice opens the door - and he collapses. Twenty years ago, his best friend, Manchester-born painter Rob, and British-Vietnamese Alice betrayed him when they left together. Now they are married, and gulilt-ridden Alice wants to secretly help destitute Jay to get his health and life back on track...
The main theme here is the nature of art in its full scope: As object, as practice, as ideology, as a capitalist endeavor, as social and romantic capital. Rob and Jay represent different attitudes towards art, both flawed and strained in the relation between ideal and market demands. Both have failed Alice, just in different ways, and Alice, the woman who has all her life been busy trying to organize mundane aspects the male "geniuses" don't want to deal with, has failed herself. Or didn't they all to a degree fail themselves? On a larger scale, the story works as a metaphor for the common experience of growing up and being damaged by circumstance, as well as the weight of making the decision of what compromises to make, and then to live with them.
Especially Jay as the performance artist is a great character to study how attitudes can define success or failure in a way that is immeasurable by money, because we are all performing our experiences, and the frame decides how to judge them (see The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life). I will not give away the twist in his story arc, let me just say it's brilliant and has to do with Albert Dadas. Rob, on the other hand, struggles with questions of authenticity and authorship, not only when it comes to trends and inspiration, but also regarding literal ownership: The title-giving "Blue Ruin" is a painting he started that was then taken away by his former boss FDP (Famous Dead Painter, now literally dead) who then proceeded to create a pastiche, painting over some parts - and his theft rendered the painting more marketable only because of his name. The painting shows tourists in orange vests leaving a cruise ship, and entering a decayed, flooded city, with parts of the ruins being composed of everyday capitalist objects like bottles - go figure.
The art world setting of the story is enhanced by the young-ish, eccentric collector who also stays on the property with his Black girlfriend, Nicole. He, in turn, is only there because an even bigger art mogul allows him to stay. Questions of money, gender and race also play a significant role in the many flashbacks that illuminate the backstory. The pressure is heightened by the panic around Covid and the general feeling that the world spins out of control, with themes like prepping, paranoia, and the murder of George Floyd.
I am a great fan of how Kunzru always layers his themes and reflects them in vignettes, history, references, or objects. In "Blue Ruin", there is a whole array of (fictional) art pieces that can be discussed in relation to the main story about three estranged friends and their love triangle, and the whole thing reads like a thriller. A wonderful, smart book that I greatly enjoyed.
You can listen to our podcast discussion (in German) here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...
The main theme here is the nature of art in its full scope: As object, as practice, as ideology, as a capitalist endeavor, as social and romantic capital. Rob and Jay represent different attitudes towards art, both flawed and strained in the relation between ideal and market demands. Both have failed Alice, just in different ways, and Alice, the woman who has all her life been busy trying to organize mundane aspects the male "geniuses" don't want to deal with, has failed herself. Or didn't they all to a degree fail themselves? On a larger scale, the story works as a metaphor for the common experience of growing up and being damaged by circumstance, as well as the weight of making the decision of what compromises to make, and then to live with them.
Especially Jay as the performance artist is a great character to study how attitudes can define success or failure in a way that is immeasurable by money, because we are all performing our experiences, and the frame decides how to judge them (see The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life). I will not give away the twist in his story arc, let me just say it's brilliant and has to do with Albert Dadas. Rob, on the other hand, struggles with questions of authenticity and authorship, not only when it comes to trends and inspiration, but also regarding literal ownership: The title-giving "Blue Ruin" is a painting he started that was then taken away by his former boss FDP (Famous Dead Painter, now literally dead) who then proceeded to create a pastiche, painting over some parts - and his theft rendered the painting more marketable only because of his name. The painting shows tourists in orange vests leaving a cruise ship, and entering a decayed, flooded city, with parts of the ruins being composed of everyday capitalist objects like bottles - go figure.
The art world setting of the story is enhanced by the young-ish, eccentric collector who also stays on the property with his Black girlfriend, Nicole. He, in turn, is only there because an even bigger art mogul allows him to stay. Questions of money, gender and race also play a significant role in the many flashbacks that illuminate the backstory. The pressure is heightened by the panic around Covid and the general feeling that the world spins out of control, with themes like prepping, paranoia, and the murder of George Floyd.
I am a great fan of how Kunzru always layers his themes and reflects them in vignettes, history, references, or objects. In "Blue Ruin", there is a whole array of (fictional) art pieces that can be discussed in relation to the main story about three estranged friends and their love triangle, and the whole thing reads like a thriller. A wonderful, smart book that I greatly enjoyed.
You can listen to our podcast discussion (in German) here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...
May 17, 2024
A devastatingly beautiful start. Two former lovers meet after a long time at the beginning of the pandemic. He is a ruin, living in the kind of nightmare that would make anyone run in shame from his promising past. She is married.
The first half is close to perfection in the way it presents this strange, hurtful, and healing meeting. So much so that I didn't care that it presents some ugly realities from the pandemic. The prose was so captivating that I searched for other books by the writer. I believed I found a new favorite author.
But the second half is the kind of mediocrity that is hard to accept after such a promising start. The prose remained beautiful here and there, but I wasn't engaged anymore by the story, by the ideas about art. I also wasn't interested in the recap of 2020 news that it became from time to time.
I can't believe that such a talented artist couldn't figure out where the beauty was in his creation. Certainly not in his certainties. Hopefully, he will discover that in future works.
The first half is close to perfection in the way it presents this strange, hurtful, and healing meeting. So much so that I didn't care that it presents some ugly realities from the pandemic. The prose was so captivating that I searched for other books by the writer. I believed I found a new favorite author.
But the second half is the kind of mediocrity that is hard to accept after such a promising start. The prose remained beautiful here and there, but I wasn't engaged anymore by the story, by the ideas about art. I also wasn't interested in the recap of 2020 news that it became from time to time.
I can't believe that such a talented artist couldn't figure out where the beauty was in his creation. Certainly not in his certainties. Hopefully, he will discover that in future works.
September 30, 2024
Erudite and multi-layered if sometimes a bit slow and cliched in terms of the art world being one big drugs scene. Also the whole theme of male art production being ignited through a three way relationship involving a girl feels almost unimaginative
It’s a fiction we seem to demand, that a person be substantially the same throughout their lives- human ships of Theseus, each part replaced, but in some essential way unchanging. We are less continuous than we pretend. There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood. I’d always had goals, even if they weren’t ones that other people could understand, but at some point I’d lost touch with the person who’d set them. If you had asked me what I was doing, delivering groceries in upstate New York, I would only have been able to give you a superficial answer.
Meet Alice: Vietnamese and from a rich family but in denial about it; Jay, half black, an Young British Artist in training and the narrator, now turned into homeless grocery delivering and Rob, the best friend of Jay, a fellow artist who ends up in a relationship with Alice.
The writing on display in Blue Ruin is impeccable (and I love the conceptual performance art Jay does in the book) but I wonder what the narrative overall is for, which I totally did not have with Red Pill by the same author, which was brimming with uncomfortable themes that made me as reader take a cold hard look at society.
The way Alice seems to have treated Jay because of racial grounds invokes emotion but is hardly enough to keep the novel afloat all by itself. Remembering, art versus life, potential to make amends and what it means to have integrity all feature as themes on the background. Hari Kunzru who's book make me think about a lot of topics, even if here it is less obvious and visible.
I think what works less in the structure of this novel is that the narration starts from the Covid-19 now (which feels like 10 years ago for me, with the wearing gloves and masks) and then works backwards to a massive section of flashbacks to Jay's, Alice's and Rob's life. Not to say those sections were not well written, the writing is actually very well done, but it takes the propulsion from the narrative and the way Jay, Alice and Rob end up is something known from the start by the reader.
Also the whole drugs all the time got quite tiring to me, while actually the conceptual art Jay does in the book is really interesting, Marina Abramović could definitely take some notes. Especially the whole “I’m going to fuck up the institute that lets me exhibit, to show that I am a serious artist” backfiring was hilarious.
Alice is someone I would have liked to have seen the perspective from, Jay comes close to interesting reflections on her but I would like to have seen her interiority more: As I looked around I understood why she’d never brought me there. It wasn’t some boudoir, some private sanctuary. Alice wasn’t keeping secrets. There was nothing to reveal, unless it was her emptiness, her lack of autonomy. There was nothing in the flat she was allowed to change or make her own.
In the current timeline there is definitely some themes that could have been developed more fully, prime amongst them Jay surviving as an undocumented migrant/gig economy worker. There are haunting scenes of him living in an overcrowded house which seem an especially harsh contrast to the wealth Rob and Alice find themselves in. The dark side of the gig economy, especially during Covid (I just do whatever the app tells me to), is only touched upon lightly. In general, Jay ever travelling and unmoored, in a way isolated from modern day existence in a sense, would have been fascinating to have seen more of.
With the dichotomy of Rob, who stands in full contrast to Jay in terms of approach to art (The other part, the part I was involved with, the struggles with politics, the questions about the purpose of art; all of that meant very little to him.), initially one might think the author has a cynical message on how to achieve success in life (or at least in art). However not everything that glitters is gold we find out in the second section of the novel, where it is shown that giving up morals has a real price. Market rigging works of an artist, that is something I would have liked to see earlier than page 200, this could have been the art world version of The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel.
In the end I lacked a twist or a carpet being pulled away under the reader.
Marshal as conspiracy theorist isn’t taken further, even if he is the one character in the real time pandemic narrative that really rubs against the grain and seems to have the potential for violence.
Questions on art and authenticity are all good an interesting, but the only lightly upon touched duty of Alice of having to clear away #metoo accusations against her husband as a trade off to live rich life: that is again a huge topic where Kunzru doesn't seem to go far enough or delve deep enough.
Overall I was disappointed compared to Red Pill, even though I see that the writing of the author definitely matured. I will be picking up White Tears soon, thanks to the warm recommendations of Lark. Hari Kunzru remains one of the most interesting, thought provoking contemporary writers to me, who really dives into ethical topics, together with Jesse Ball.
Quotes:
Alice’s competence had survived even the last year of our relationship, when we were actively trying to crash and burn, to let ourselves go to hell. It was a kind of weakness in her. If you’re a problem-solver, sooner or later people learn that they can bring their problems to you, and after that you’re never free.
When I was with Alice, my art was a kind of self-therapy, a way to map the particular channels of my unhappiness.
I wanted to make art from struggle., the struggle of staying alive every day. I thought a lot about drowning, asphyxiation.
I had begun to store up small resentments against Alice. When we were together I felt as if I were holding my breath all the time.
I was so preoccupied with trying to maintain our love affair that in a certain way I forget to have it.
I experienced an odd sense of disappointment. When, for a moment, you suspect that you’ve come to the edge of reality, you find out how you really feel about the world.
Of course it’s one thing not to speak about your feelings, another to be afraid of them, or act without understanding why.
You were always very critical of beautiful things.
I’m sure there’s a lot we remember differently.
OK, then. You’re an artist but you’re not making art.
In a very precise sense I knew I had to work in vain, in a way that wasn’t about accumulation or achievement.
What kind of statement ate you making, one asked. I said I wanted to be outside the space of statements, to exist in the space of events.
Only in the system we have, where everyone is expected to be an entrepreneur of the self, is anonymity a kind of death.
It just seemed to me that being absent was more interesting than being present.
Art itself consisted of finding ways to say no, to become invisible to power. Only then could an artwork have any claim to authenticity.
It’s like he wants to make our whole world come crashing down.
No part of my life was in a stable relationship to any other.
If I’d thought about how it would end, it would have drained the whole project of meaning.
Did I really think time was lost if it wasn’t converted into art?
During an argument, Alice once said to me that I mistook unhappiness for love.
Paradise is a walled garden.
It’s a fiction we seem to demand, that a person be substantially the same throughout their lives- human ships of Theseus, each part replaced, but in some essential way unchanging. We are less continuous than we pretend. There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood. I’d always had goals, even if they weren’t ones that other people could understand, but at some point I’d lost touch with the person who’d set them. If you had asked me what I was doing, delivering groceries in upstate New York, I would only have been able to give you a superficial answer.
Meet Alice: Vietnamese and from a rich family but in denial about it; Jay, half black, an Young British Artist in training and the narrator, now turned into homeless grocery delivering and Rob, the best friend of Jay, a fellow artist who ends up in a relationship with Alice.
The writing on display in Blue Ruin is impeccable (and I love the conceptual performance art Jay does in the book) but I wonder what the narrative overall is for, which I totally did not have with Red Pill by the same author, which was brimming with uncomfortable themes that made me as reader take a cold hard look at society.
The way Alice seems to have treated Jay because of racial grounds invokes emotion but is hardly enough to keep the novel afloat all by itself. Remembering, art versus life, potential to make amends and what it means to have integrity all feature as themes on the background. Hari Kunzru who's book make me think about a lot of topics, even if here it is less obvious and visible.
I think what works less in the structure of this novel is that the narration starts from the Covid-19 now (which feels like 10 years ago for me, with the wearing gloves and masks) and then works backwards to a massive section of flashbacks to Jay's, Alice's and Rob's life. Not to say those sections were not well written, the writing is actually very well done, but it takes the propulsion from the narrative and the way Jay, Alice and Rob end up is something known from the start by the reader.
Also the whole drugs all the time got quite tiring to me, while actually the conceptual art Jay does in the book is really interesting, Marina Abramović could definitely take some notes. Especially the whole “I’m going to fuck up the institute that lets me exhibit, to show that I am a serious artist” backfiring was hilarious.
Alice is someone I would have liked to have seen the perspective from, Jay comes close to interesting reflections on her but I would like to have seen her interiority more: As I looked around I understood why she’d never brought me there. It wasn’t some boudoir, some private sanctuary. Alice wasn’t keeping secrets. There was nothing to reveal, unless it was her emptiness, her lack of autonomy. There was nothing in the flat she was allowed to change or make her own.
In the current timeline there is definitely some themes that could have been developed more fully, prime amongst them Jay surviving as an undocumented migrant/gig economy worker. There are haunting scenes of him living in an overcrowded house which seem an especially harsh contrast to the wealth Rob and Alice find themselves in. The dark side of the gig economy, especially during Covid (I just do whatever the app tells me to), is only touched upon lightly. In general, Jay ever travelling and unmoored, in a way isolated from modern day existence in a sense, would have been fascinating to have seen more of.
With the dichotomy of Rob, who stands in full contrast to Jay in terms of approach to art (The other part, the part I was involved with, the struggles with politics, the questions about the purpose of art; all of that meant very little to him.), initially one might think the author has a cynical message on how to achieve success in life (or at least in art). However not everything that glitters is gold we find out in the second section of the novel, where it is shown that giving up morals has a real price. Market rigging works of an artist, that is something I would have liked to see earlier than page 200, this could have been the art world version of The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel.
In the end I lacked a twist or a carpet being pulled away under the reader.
Marshal as conspiracy theorist isn’t taken further, even if he is the one character in the real time pandemic narrative that really rubs against the grain and seems to have the potential for violence.
Questions on art and authenticity are all good an interesting, but the only lightly upon touched duty of Alice of having to clear away #metoo accusations against her husband as a trade off to live rich life: that is again a huge topic where Kunzru doesn't seem to go far enough or delve deep enough.
Overall I was disappointed compared to Red Pill, even though I see that the writing of the author definitely matured. I will be picking up White Tears soon, thanks to the warm recommendations of Lark. Hari Kunzru remains one of the most interesting, thought provoking contemporary writers to me, who really dives into ethical topics, together with Jesse Ball.
Quotes:
Alice’s competence had survived even the last year of our relationship, when we were actively trying to crash and burn, to let ourselves go to hell. It was a kind of weakness in her. If you’re a problem-solver, sooner or later people learn that they can bring their problems to you, and after that you’re never free.
When I was with Alice, my art was a kind of self-therapy, a way to map the particular channels of my unhappiness.
I wanted to make art from struggle., the struggle of staying alive every day. I thought a lot about drowning, asphyxiation.
I had begun to store up small resentments against Alice. When we were together I felt as if I were holding my breath all the time.
I was so preoccupied with trying to maintain our love affair that in a certain way I forget to have it.
I experienced an odd sense of disappointment. When, for a moment, you suspect that you’ve come to the edge of reality, you find out how you really feel about the world.
Of course it’s one thing not to speak about your feelings, another to be afraid of them, or act without understanding why.
You were always very critical of beautiful things.
I’m sure there’s a lot we remember differently.
OK, then. You’re an artist but you’re not making art.
In a very precise sense I knew I had to work in vain, in a way that wasn’t about accumulation or achievement.
What kind of statement ate you making, one asked. I said I wanted to be outside the space of statements, to exist in the space of events.
Only in the system we have, where everyone is expected to be an entrepreneur of the self, is anonymity a kind of death.
It just seemed to me that being absent was more interesting than being present.
Art itself consisted of finding ways to say no, to become invisible to power. Only then could an artwork have any claim to authenticity.
It’s like he wants to make our whole world come crashing down.
No part of my life was in a stable relationship to any other.
If I’d thought about how it would end, it would have drained the whole project of meaning.
Did I really think time was lost if it wasn’t converted into art?
During an argument, Alice once said to me that I mistook unhappiness for love.
Paradise is a walled garden.
May 20, 2024
(3.5) Despite a title that seems to be in conversation with Kunzru’s two previous novels,
White Tears
and Red Pill, this book dispenses with its predecessors’ touches of surrealism (the uncanny song in White, the prophetic TV show in Red) and tells a more straightforward story. The three main characters, all aspiring artists, are in a love triangle as students; many years later, one of them – Jay, now so destitute he’s living in his car – washes up at the luxurious home of the other two, married couple Alice and Rob. It’s also a pandemic novel, with all the key scenes set in the late spring/early summer of 2020. Characters’ panic about the virus manifests in a variety of ways (and is arguably the engine of the plot, too).
Much of the first half consists of Jay reflecting on his short, messy relationship with Alice; these scenes are well-written, but inconsequential. While Kunzru sketches a neat portrait of the young Jay – his naivety and idealism, as well as the late-90s London art scene through which he moves – I wasn’t sure why I should care, or where this was all going. Meanwhile, whenever we return to 2020, the dialogue between Jay, Alice, Rob and another couple has a sheen of unreality. Maybe it was just the Covid references, but I felt like I was watching actors perform a scene, rather than eavesdropping on a real conversation.
And I questioned whether this artificiality is deliberate; we are, after all, encouraged to wonder what is true about Jay. (A sculpture made of multiple, spiralling mirrors – which Jay visits several times, and is even moved to tears by – seems significant here. As does the belief, shared by almost everyone and thus communicated to the reader, that Jay’s presence is too wild a coincidence to have happened purely by chance.) I found Jay’s account of himself unconvincing. Are we supposed to think he’s lying? Partly because he’s still hung up on Alice after so long, it’s hard to believe Jay has had the rich life experience he claims; it’s as though he’s jumped from being a student straight into middle age. Which, of course, for the purposes of the story, he has. But should it feel quite so much like that’s the case? Is it meant to be so noticeable?
As I read Blue Ruin, and especially throughout the climax and ending, I kept thinking of questions like this – about the characters, and about the book. I found myself inventing and discarding theories about what was really going on, and whether some of the vaguely frustrating narrative techniques were a tricksy manoeuvre on the part of the author and/or his narrator (as in something like Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands). Should we ask whether this whole story is part of Jay’s performance art, or is that stretching the metaphor too far, inventing an authorial intention that isn’t there? Is it better for fiction to be thought-provoking than a good story? Even if so, is it enough for it to be thought-provoking?
The closing lines put such a neat cap on the story that they make it all seem weightless. As if Rob, Alice et al have disappeared in a puff of smoke. While it takes particular talent to write something that feels that way, I’m not sure I want to read books where the characters leave no impression. I’m left with mixed feelings about Blue Ruin. It’s more interesting to think about than to read. But then, sometimes I really enjoy that.
I received an advance review copy of Blue Ruin from the publisher through Edelweiss.
Much of the first half consists of Jay reflecting on his short, messy relationship with Alice; these scenes are well-written, but inconsequential. While Kunzru sketches a neat portrait of the young Jay – his naivety and idealism, as well as the late-90s London art scene through which he moves – I wasn’t sure why I should care, or where this was all going. Meanwhile, whenever we return to 2020, the dialogue between Jay, Alice, Rob and another couple has a sheen of unreality. Maybe it was just the Covid references, but I felt like I was watching actors perform a scene, rather than eavesdropping on a real conversation.
And I questioned whether this artificiality is deliberate; we are, after all, encouraged to wonder what is true about Jay. (A sculpture made of multiple, spiralling mirrors – which Jay visits several times, and is even moved to tears by – seems significant here. As does the belief, shared by almost everyone and thus communicated to the reader, that Jay’s presence is too wild a coincidence to have happened purely by chance.) I found Jay’s account of himself unconvincing. Are we supposed to think he’s lying? Partly because he’s still hung up on Alice after so long, it’s hard to believe Jay has had the rich life experience he claims; it’s as though he’s jumped from being a student straight into middle age. Which, of course, for the purposes of the story, he has. But should it feel quite so much like that’s the case? Is it meant to be so noticeable?
As I read Blue Ruin, and especially throughout the climax and ending, I kept thinking of questions like this – about the characters, and about the book. I found myself inventing and discarding theories about what was really going on, and whether some of the vaguely frustrating narrative techniques were a tricksy manoeuvre on the part of the author and/or his narrator (as in something like Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands). Should we ask whether this whole story is part of Jay’s performance art, or is that stretching the metaphor too far, inventing an authorial intention that isn’t there? Is it better for fiction to be thought-provoking than a good story? Even if so, is it enough for it to be thought-provoking?
The closing lines put such a neat cap on the story that they make it all seem weightless. As if Rob, Alice et al have disappeared in a puff of smoke. While it takes particular talent to write something that feels that way, I’m not sure I want to read books where the characters leave no impression. I’m left with mixed feelings about Blue Ruin. It’s more interesting to think about than to read. But then, sometimes I really enjoy that.
I received an advance review copy of Blue Ruin from the publisher through Edelweiss.
June 16, 2024
The last chapter was a little bit interesting.
July 12, 2024
4.50⭐️ (rnd ⬆️) — Kunzru is an experience almost entirely of his own. He is perhaps - currently - the most unique voice in Literary Fiction. Ironically, his latest novel is one of those reverse-microcosms of its own subject, the world of modern art, in that like a great artist whom could paint anything at all, chooses to paint something so basic, so simple in comparison to previous work, that it’s somehow all the more beautiful and intoxicating. Blue Ruin shines insomuch it is so full & rich with simplicity, that is stripped-down, yet laden with elegantly efficient sentences that are - somehow - simultaneously poignant, straight forward yet also hold an elegiac flirtation despite being (almost) flair-free, that it is abundantly clear only a true master of prose could ever have penned it.
Hari Kunzru’s “Blue Ruin” marks a riveting conclusion to his lightly-tied-together trilogy that began with “White Tears” and “Red Pill.” Kunzru's novels, all delve into the depths of societal and cultural undercurrents, though his palette is uniquely contemporary,. “Blue Ruin” is a compelling Covid-era narrative that confronts themes of art, survival, and moral decay with unflinching intensity that cant be read without an almost constant dalliance with a state of nebulousness, that’s maniacally terrifyingly enjoyable.
In “White Tears,” Kunzru explored the sinister side of cultural appropriation through the eyes of white-American record collectors obsessed with Black music in the American South. It was a stark portrayal of creativity entangled with a special and uniquely portrayed racism and inequality.
“Red Pill” — A book that still makes me pause whenever it is mentioned, so intense was its gnawing-baseline of nervy bombastically engrained, subversively avarice-like intensity — transitioned into the paranoid mind of a writer at a Berlin retreat, weaving a tale that echoed the anxieties of modern surveillance & far-right extremism, alongside left leaning fears. These novels were marked by their bold, often grim explorations, eschewing levity for an unyielding gaze at the darker facets of society.
“Blue Ruin” — thrusts us into the eerie isolation of a luxurious compound in upstate New York, right in the heart beat of the pandemic. A group of affluent art-world elites, hiding from the virus and the masses whom they fear may come to them full-zombie mode, begins to suspect that the grocery delivery man, Jay, might be a threat of the highest-order. Jay, a performance artist who vanished two decades prior, has now reappeared, seemingly debilitated by long Covid. The compound’s occupants include his ex-best friend Rob, now a sellout artist, and his former lover Alice, who left Jay for Rob. Surely this man didn’t arrive by chance? Or as one of the art-elites asks when first hearing of the serendipity at play “Is this a porno?” — This tense reunion is fraught with unresolved pasts and new dangers, although one is never really sure form which side. Kunzru delivers in his typical and superb first-person style, again almost as if he is Jay himself, such is his way of aligning himself to his protagonists in this loose trilogy.
Jay’s collapse upon delivering said groceries and subsequent concealment by his ex-love Alice in a barn at the compound, set the stage for a gripping & deeply human, narrative. Kunzru masterfully unravels their shared history, transporting readers to their art school days in London. The idealistic fervor of their youth, filled with avant-garde theories and artistic ambitions, starkly contrasts with their present disillusionments. Jay’s enigmatic project, “Fugue,” becomes a symbol of his self-imposed exile, living a life stripped down to the bare essentials, in stark opposition to the opulent surroundings of his former friends.
Kunzru’s prose is dense with introspection and critique, often bordering on the philosophical. He questions the authenticity of suffering when it can be abandoned at will, and the hollow righteousness of rejecting capitalist comforts while secretly longing for them. Jay’s disdain for Alice’s insulated life in the compound challenges readers to reflect on the true nature of freedom and sacrifice. But in my view, there is light and humour here, despite many others not feeling this element in any of his work, this where Kunzru’s reading can be so powerful, for it’s in this that the humour truly takes shape and becomes brilliantly yet subtly evident.
While “Blue Ruin” might lean towards the didactic at times, its narrative potency lies in its relentless examination of its characters’ flaws and the socio-political landscapes they navigate. Kunzru doesn’t offer easy answers, but rather, a mirror reflecting the complexities of our times. This final installment is a fittingly unsettling closure to a trilogy that never shies away from the uncomfortable truths of human nature and societal constructs.
This latest Kunzru effort earns a well-deserved ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ being rounded-up by his (again) near flawless performance in narration, that in the end was so good I couldn’t finish the book without having audible
On simultaneously! But truly, its audacious storytelling and profound thematic depth are what makes this such a compelling book, further solidifying Hari Kunzru’s reputation as a fearless voice in contemporary literature.
I simply cannot WAIT for what he does next..
Hari Kunzru’s “Blue Ruin” marks a riveting conclusion to his lightly-tied-together trilogy that began with “White Tears” and “Red Pill.” Kunzru's novels, all delve into the depths of societal and cultural undercurrents, though his palette is uniquely contemporary,. “Blue Ruin” is a compelling Covid-era narrative that confronts themes of art, survival, and moral decay with unflinching intensity that cant be read without an almost constant dalliance with a state of nebulousness, that’s maniacally terrifyingly enjoyable.
In “White Tears,” Kunzru explored the sinister side of cultural appropriation through the eyes of white-American record collectors obsessed with Black music in the American South. It was a stark portrayal of creativity entangled with a special and uniquely portrayed racism and inequality.
“Red Pill” — A book that still makes me pause whenever it is mentioned, so intense was its gnawing-baseline of nervy bombastically engrained, subversively avarice-like intensity — transitioned into the paranoid mind of a writer at a Berlin retreat, weaving a tale that echoed the anxieties of modern surveillance & far-right extremism, alongside left leaning fears. These novels were marked by their bold, often grim explorations, eschewing levity for an unyielding gaze at the darker facets of society.
“Blue Ruin” — thrusts us into the eerie isolation of a luxurious compound in upstate New York, right in the heart beat of the pandemic. A group of affluent art-world elites, hiding from the virus and the masses whom they fear may come to them full-zombie mode, begins to suspect that the grocery delivery man, Jay, might be a threat of the highest-order. Jay, a performance artist who vanished two decades prior, has now reappeared, seemingly debilitated by long Covid. The compound’s occupants include his ex-best friend Rob, now a sellout artist, and his former lover Alice, who left Jay for Rob. Surely this man didn’t arrive by chance? Or as one of the art-elites asks when first hearing of the serendipity at play “Is this a porno?” — This tense reunion is fraught with unresolved pasts and new dangers, although one is never really sure form which side. Kunzru delivers in his typical and superb first-person style, again almost as if he is Jay himself, such is his way of aligning himself to his protagonists in this loose trilogy.
Jay’s collapse upon delivering said groceries and subsequent concealment by his ex-love Alice in a barn at the compound, set the stage for a gripping & deeply human, narrative. Kunzru masterfully unravels their shared history, transporting readers to their art school days in London. The idealistic fervor of their youth, filled with avant-garde theories and artistic ambitions, starkly contrasts with their present disillusionments. Jay’s enigmatic project, “Fugue,” becomes a symbol of his self-imposed exile, living a life stripped down to the bare essentials, in stark opposition to the opulent surroundings of his former friends.
Kunzru’s prose is dense with introspection and critique, often bordering on the philosophical. He questions the authenticity of suffering when it can be abandoned at will, and the hollow righteousness of rejecting capitalist comforts while secretly longing for them. Jay’s disdain for Alice’s insulated life in the compound challenges readers to reflect on the true nature of freedom and sacrifice. But in my view, there is light and humour here, despite many others not feeling this element in any of his work, this where Kunzru’s reading can be so powerful, for it’s in this that the humour truly takes shape and becomes brilliantly yet subtly evident.
While “Blue Ruin” might lean towards the didactic at times, its narrative potency lies in its relentless examination of its characters’ flaws and the socio-political landscapes they navigate. Kunzru doesn’t offer easy answers, but rather, a mirror reflecting the complexities of our times. This final installment is a fittingly unsettling closure to a trilogy that never shies away from the uncomfortable truths of human nature and societal constructs.
This latest Kunzru effort earns a well-deserved ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ being rounded-up by his (again) near flawless performance in narration, that in the end was so good I couldn’t finish the book without having audible
On simultaneously! But truly, its audacious storytelling and profound thematic depth are what makes this such a compelling book, further solidifying Hari Kunzru’s reputation as a fearless voice in contemporary literature.
I simply cannot WAIT for what he does next..
June 2, 2024
Blue Ruin is the last book in Hari Kunzru's trilogy, with White Tears and Red Pill coming before. The term 'trilogy' should be taken quite loosely, as they are books connected thematically only, and each could easily be read on their own. I say that only having read this, and White Tears (somehow Red got by me, so if I'm missing key components in my comments about this trilogy, that is one glaring reason why).
The themes of art - what is it? whose is it? and its very messy intersection with money - are what connects these books. The stories are also racially charged.
In White Tears, a book that is mysterious and haunting and furious all at once, the question of cultural appropriation in the music world is explored. The world, and sound, and time, and everything in the story gets rather... bendy... at least to my recollection. I loved that book. It looked me straight in the face, it taught me things.
This novel was different in many ways. Set during the pandemic, Blue Ruin focuses on art through the characters of Jay (performance artist) and Rob (painter). Jay is intense and philosophical, and abhors the thought of art being monetized and wants to detach his self from his art - an idea of which I seriously question the possibility - which causes him to actually disappear from his friends and family for many years. Rob, on the other hand, loves the act of creating, and has an enormous ego, and has found financial success in his work.
The ideas explored here interest me, because they can be applied to any facet of art, including the literary world. Business is at once an unwelcome and integral part of making books available to people, and attaching "success" to one over another is absurd, particularly certain books (the ones on the NYT bestseller list, the most financially rewarded, are often the WORST).
An enormous part of this book is exposition, with Kunzru making the past known to the reader through Jay's memories. It's a testament to the writing that I stayed interested, because I typically don't love experiencing a book with that much narrative summary, and I still wonder if there could have been a better way of doing that. It was much more interesting when the story was unfolding in real time rather than in remembrances. And unfortunately, what was unfolding was less interesting than the past; the leftover love triangle wasn't particularly original, but it sure took a good deal of the book's energy.
I kept waiting for the book to get "bendy" like in White Tears but was surprised that it was so straightforward, and thus not as challenging, and certainly not nearly as exciting and confrontational as I had hoped.
The themes of art - what is it? whose is it? and its very messy intersection with money - are what connects these books. The stories are also racially charged.
In White Tears, a book that is mysterious and haunting and furious all at once, the question of cultural appropriation in the music world is explored. The world, and sound, and time, and everything in the story gets rather... bendy... at least to my recollection. I loved that book. It looked me straight in the face, it taught me things.
This novel was different in many ways. Set during the pandemic, Blue Ruin focuses on art through the characters of Jay (performance artist) and Rob (painter). Jay is intense and philosophical, and abhors the thought of art being monetized and wants to detach his self from his art - an idea of which I seriously question the possibility - which causes him to actually disappear from his friends and family for many years. Rob, on the other hand, loves the act of creating, and has an enormous ego, and has found financial success in his work.
The ideas explored here interest me, because they can be applied to any facet of art, including the literary world. Business is at once an unwelcome and integral part of making books available to people, and attaching "success" to one over another is absurd, particularly certain books (the ones on the NYT bestseller list, the most financially rewarded, are often the WORST).
An enormous part of this book is exposition, with Kunzru making the past known to the reader through Jay's memories. It's a testament to the writing that I stayed interested, because I typically don't love experiencing a book with that much narrative summary, and I still wonder if there could have been a better way of doing that. It was much more interesting when the story was unfolding in real time rather than in remembrances. And unfortunately, what was unfolding was less interesting than the past; the leftover love triangle wasn't particularly original, but it sure took a good deal of the book's energy.
I kept waiting for the book to get "bendy" like in White Tears but was surprised that it was so straightforward, and thus not as challenging, and certainly not nearly as exciting and confrontational as I had hoped.
July 16, 2024
At the height of the pandemic Jay is working delivering groceries in upstate New York and living out of his car, when he delivers food to a remote house on an estate of many acres. The woman who meets him at the door turns out to be Alice, his girlfriend from when he was an art student in 1990s London, and whom he hasn't seen for 20 years. Moreover Alice is still married to Jay's best friend, and fellow artist, Rob. Told in flashbacks (which I would have preferred to sink into more fully) we learn that Jay was a conceptual / performance artist who decided to disappear for his last piece. Jay is ill with the virus and Alice decides to hide him on the property.
I really enjoyed this, both the present day sections and the past, and the writing. It asks some interesting questions: about whether art is art if there is no one there to witness it, whether art is real art if it is made for profit, whether the twenty years in which Jay was missing counted as part of his 'performance' even if it was documented, and when does a piece of art like this, end? It also asks questions about race but sometimes I felt these were a little shoe-horned in.
I really enjoyed this, both the present day sections and the past, and the writing. It asks some interesting questions: about whether art is art if there is no one there to witness it, whether art is real art if it is made for profit, whether the twenty years in which Jay was missing counted as part of his 'performance' even if it was documented, and when does a piece of art like this, end? It also asks questions about race but sometimes I felt these were a little shoe-horned in.
May 2, 2024
When Hari Kunzru – whom I believe is one of the most talented authors writing today – comes out with a new book, it’s always cause for celebration. Blue Ruin is the final book of his trilogy, and all three are mesmerizing. In White Tears, he showcased a pair of scam artists who created a “lost” blues track and in Red Pill, he meditates on the legacy of the far right, which blends facts and fiction to the point that truth becomes unrecognizable in an increasingly anarchic world. Now, in Blue Ruins, he takes on the visual arts and whether purity and capitalism can co-exist in the world we live in.
What do the three books have in common? Like the other two, it focuses on a country that is becoming unmoored from its original identity, particularly due to the culture and power disconnect. Although the storyline is of contemporary art, all three books showcase a disintegration of values and connections.
Blue Ruin can be read as a stand-alone, though. In this book, set in the early days of COVID, we have fallen into the height of madness. Jay, a once-promising graduate of a London art school, has now fallen low—living out of his car and delivering groceries. It is during one of these grocery runs that he encounters his former lover, Alice, and Rob, a fellow artist whom she left him for and who is now her husband.
Jay has fallen away from the purity of his best ideas, resorting to what the non-art world would consider gimmicks: trying to put a frame around a certain part of life, to declare that inside the frame was art, and outside was not. He wants to live without an artistic identity but at the same time, to live entirely within the frame of art: to BE art. His friend has given in to more capitalistic instincts. Kunzru asks: in a world dominated by the interests of the rich and powerful, should an artist live like a spy or spiritual fugitive? Does art consist of finding ways to say no and become invisible to power? What does art mean in this shifting, changing, non-cohesive, unfair world?
All good questions and as always, Hari Kunzru makes his readers interrogate their own views. I am so grateful to Alfred A. Knopf, publisher, for the opportunity to be an early reader in exchange for an honest review.
What do the three books have in common? Like the other two, it focuses on a country that is becoming unmoored from its original identity, particularly due to the culture and power disconnect. Although the storyline is of contemporary art, all three books showcase a disintegration of values and connections.
Blue Ruin can be read as a stand-alone, though. In this book, set in the early days of COVID, we have fallen into the height of madness. Jay, a once-promising graduate of a London art school, has now fallen low—living out of his car and delivering groceries. It is during one of these grocery runs that he encounters his former lover, Alice, and Rob, a fellow artist whom she left him for and who is now her husband.
Jay has fallen away from the purity of his best ideas, resorting to what the non-art world would consider gimmicks: trying to put a frame around a certain part of life, to declare that inside the frame was art, and outside was not. He wants to live without an artistic identity but at the same time, to live entirely within the frame of art: to BE art. His friend has given in to more capitalistic instincts. Kunzru asks: in a world dominated by the interests of the rich and powerful, should an artist live like a spy or spiritual fugitive? Does art consist of finding ways to say no and become invisible to power? What does art mean in this shifting, changing, non-cohesive, unfair world?
All good questions and as always, Hari Kunzru makes his readers interrogate their own views. I am so grateful to Alfred A. Knopf, publisher, for the opportunity to be an early reader in exchange for an honest review.
July 12, 2024
Am Besten hat mir an diesem Buch gefallen, wie Kunzru meine Lesehaltung entlarvt, wie er mir vor Augen führt, dass ich eine erzählte Figur, ohne dass ich es explizit weiß, für weiß halte.
Nachdem ich mich bereits 67 Seiten im Kopf des Erzählers befand, folgende Passage:
“‘Du bist leicht wiederzuerkennen.“ Sie zeigte auf ihren Kopf. Ich trug die Haare jetzt länger und mit einem Tuch zusammengebunden. Ansonsten hatte ich mir äußerlich nie auch nur einen Hauch von Wildheit erlaubt, aber mir die Haare wachsen zu lassen war eine Befreiung gewesen, nachdem feindselige weiße Friseure sie mir jahrelang abrasiert hatten, weil sie nicht wussten, was sie damit anfangen sollten.“
Man sollte denken, ich hätte es begriffen und würde von nun aufmerksamer/offener lesen, und wieder wurde ich überrascht, als ich über Nicole erst nach einer ganzen Weile, als einer der Männer sie überreden will, für einen Bekannten Modell zu stehen, dies erfuhr.
“‘Nicole, reiß dich zusammen.‘
‚Bin ich Teil eines Deals zwischen euch beiden?‘
Rob schlug einen besänftigenden Tonfall an. ‚Ich will Bilder von starken schwarzen Frauen machen. Marshal, erklär’s ihr.“
Andererseits füllen wir doch alle Leerstellen beim Lesen auf, damit wir uns das Gelesene bildlich vorstellen können. Wenn ich mir literarische Figuren vorstelle, kann ich schwerlich die Hautfarbe offenlassen. Ich fülle ja auch fehlende Informationen zu Haar- und Augenfarbe unbewusst einfach auf. Dass Kunzru mich freundlich foppt, mich zwingt, mich mit solchen Gedanken zu befassen, halte ich für die eigentliche Qualität des Buches.
Der Plot selbst hat in meinen Augen Längen. Ich bin davon ausgegangen, dass die Beschreibung der Pandemie-Situation genauso viel Raum einnimmt, wie die der Kunstszene und des Künstlertums; die Szenen in New York ungefähr der Zahl der Szenen in London entsprechen. Tatsächlich nimmt der Rückblick auf das London um 2000 einen ziemlich großen Raum ein, gefolgt von der Odyssee Jays – zu Lasten der anderen genannten Themen. Das fand ich sehr schade, aber das ist möglicherweise auch mal wieder ein bisschen durch den Klappentext getriggert, der eher vom Verlag als vom Autor stammend wird; dort ist prominent von Verschwörungstheorien und Prepper die Rede.
Nachdem ich mich bereits 67 Seiten im Kopf des Erzählers befand, folgende Passage:
“‘Du bist leicht wiederzuerkennen.“ Sie zeigte auf ihren Kopf. Ich trug die Haare jetzt länger und mit einem Tuch zusammengebunden. Ansonsten hatte ich mir äußerlich nie auch nur einen Hauch von Wildheit erlaubt, aber mir die Haare wachsen zu lassen war eine Befreiung gewesen, nachdem feindselige weiße Friseure sie mir jahrelang abrasiert hatten, weil sie nicht wussten, was sie damit anfangen sollten.“
Man sollte denken, ich hätte es begriffen und würde von nun aufmerksamer/offener lesen, und wieder wurde ich überrascht, als ich über Nicole erst nach einer ganzen Weile, als einer der Männer sie überreden will, für einen Bekannten Modell zu stehen, dies erfuhr.
“‘Nicole, reiß dich zusammen.‘
‚Bin ich Teil eines Deals zwischen euch beiden?‘
Rob schlug einen besänftigenden Tonfall an. ‚Ich will Bilder von starken schwarzen Frauen machen. Marshal, erklär’s ihr.“
Andererseits füllen wir doch alle Leerstellen beim Lesen auf, damit wir uns das Gelesene bildlich vorstellen können. Wenn ich mir literarische Figuren vorstelle, kann ich schwerlich die Hautfarbe offenlassen. Ich fülle ja auch fehlende Informationen zu Haar- und Augenfarbe unbewusst einfach auf. Dass Kunzru mich freundlich foppt, mich zwingt, mich mit solchen Gedanken zu befassen, halte ich für die eigentliche Qualität des Buches.
Der Plot selbst hat in meinen Augen Längen. Ich bin davon ausgegangen, dass die Beschreibung der Pandemie-Situation genauso viel Raum einnimmt, wie die der Kunstszene und des Künstlertums; die Szenen in New York ungefähr der Zahl der Szenen in London entsprechen. Tatsächlich nimmt der Rückblick auf das London um 2000 einen ziemlich großen Raum ein, gefolgt von der Odyssee Jays – zu Lasten der anderen genannten Themen. Das fand ich sehr schade, aber das ist möglicherweise auch mal wieder ein bisschen durch den Klappentext getriggert, der eher vom Verlag als vom Autor stammend wird; dort ist prominent von Verschwörungstheorien und Prepper die Rede.
May 26, 2024
I loved Kunzru’s White Tears, Red Pill and Gods without Men. Blue Ruin is slightly less challenging and maybe that’s why I prefer the other three, but it’s still a great and fascinating read. Kunzru’s characters are always interesting and he makes you think deeply about stuff, in this case art, love and friendship.
Thank you Knopf and Edelweiss for the ARC.
Thank you Knopf and Edelweiss for the ARC.
June 16, 2024
4,5
Hari Kunzru has become my favourite author these last few years so I was eagerly anticipating Blue Ruin.
The story, in essence a classic love triangle between two artists friends, Jay and Rob, and free-spirited (but also rich and French) Alice, really drew me in and held my interest until the end. Jay, the promise of the London art scene in the late '90s is the hero of the story and the book opens 20 years later in Covid times, when he's hit rock bottom, living out of his car and making some money with deliveries. By pure chance, he delivers groceries to Alice, his big love of twenty years ago, but now she's together with Rob ...
I enjoyed the story and Kunzru's good writing, the occasional great sentence, the perfect choice of words, the astute observation. But this novel didn't blow me away like his previous 'Red Pill' or 'White Tears' with their daring plots, smart way of approaching sensitive themes and their touch of dark mystery. Blue Ruin is more straightforward and its main theme - the state of the art world - didn't feel as urgent as the other works.
I would still recommend this, but if someone wants to discover Kunzru I would tell them to start elsewhere.
Hari Kunzru has become my favourite author these last few years so I was eagerly anticipating Blue Ruin.
The story, in essence a classic love triangle between two artists friends, Jay and Rob, and free-spirited (but also rich and French) Alice, really drew me in and held my interest until the end. Jay, the promise of the London art scene in the late '90s is the hero of the story and the book opens 20 years later in Covid times, when he's hit rock bottom, living out of his car and making some money with deliveries. By pure chance, he delivers groceries to Alice, his big love of twenty years ago, but now she's together with Rob ...
I enjoyed the story and Kunzru's good writing, the occasional great sentence, the perfect choice of words, the astute observation. But this novel didn't blow me away like his previous 'Red Pill' or 'White Tears' with their daring plots, smart way of approaching sensitive themes and their touch of dark mystery. Blue Ruin is more straightforward and its main theme - the state of the art world - didn't feel as urgent as the other works.
I would still recommend this, but if someone wants to discover Kunzru I would tell them to start elsewhere.
May 24, 2024
Hach, ich freue mich, dass Hari Kunzru mich nach Red Pill erneut begeistern konnte! Blue Ruin: Roman ist puzzlemäßig nicht ganz so vielschichtig, aber dafür auf anderen Ebenen sehr anspruchsvoll. Das pandemisches Künstler*innenkammerspiel ist auch für Lesende zu empfehlen, die nicht viel mit Kunst am Hut haben - die Typen, die Szene, die Bedeutung von Kunst und vieles mehr sind locker auf andere Bereiche übertragbar und einfach zu gut. Ganz großes narratives Kino und auch das Coronasetting passt perfekt.
Mehr zum Buch in unserer ausführlichen Besprechung @ Papierstau Podcast: #299: Queenz of the Internetz
Mehr zum Buch in unserer ausführlichen Besprechung @ Papierstau Podcast: #299: Queenz of the Internetz
couldn-t-get-through-it
May 31, 2024I've liked or loved every Kunzru I've read, including the first two books in this triptych, but the characters in this book were so deeply uninteresting to me that I had no will to continue. Maybe art student angst is not my thing. I listened to the audio, but I don't think that made a difference.
May 23, 2024
Weirdly reminiscent of Memory Piece, a performance artist disappears for decades only to randomly wash up at an ex-girfriend’s pandemic hideout while delivering groceries. Was this truly random? I have to say that this was one of the greatest opening scenes in a book, the cringe was palpable. I wanted Jay to just drive out of there. Throw the bags out and leave man! But of course he's stuck and is forced to face his past.
In Blue Ruin we get to see how Jay, Rob, and Alice met in London as art school graduates in the 90s and what led them to imagine Jay dead for decades. How did Rob become almost a painting machine married to Alice, while Jay, the idealist, took random jobs around the world, becoming a mystery to the art world? We question making art under capitalism and if one form of art (or life) is more authentic than another, or maybe it's all just bs - can you do anything under the framing of ‘art’ and sell it as such? Is art just a rich people's playground? Art and artists alike are made into commodities. While I love thinking about this I'm not sure if we ended up anywhere new here. There seemed to be some set up for questioning borders and legality and there was something building up about class and race lines, but these ideas weren't explored to the fullest. Instead we get a tired cheating story with some of the most annoying characters around (Alice, please, get a backbone!) and I'm left to wonder if I'm supposed to believe anything that's happening or am I supposed to question it.
I did love the writing here and Kunzru does create characters that are fully formed, just be ready to hate all of their choices. My favorite parts of the book were the flashbacks, reading about that late 90s/early aughts YBA era felt real and brought back memories. I also fell for Jay’s struggles with his backbreaking work around the world - which also seems to work on the rich people in the 2020 storyline. This is when the characters and conversations become too cliched for me, making me question what the point is beyond excess leading to a false reality that must be kept up.
This was a fascinating but frustrating read.
In Blue Ruin we get to see how Jay, Rob, and Alice met in London as art school graduates in the 90s and what led them to imagine Jay dead for decades. How did Rob become almost a painting machine married to Alice, while Jay, the idealist, took random jobs around the world, becoming a mystery to the art world? We question making art under capitalism and if one form of art (or life) is more authentic than another, or maybe it's all just bs - can you do anything under the framing of ‘art’ and sell it as such? Is art just a rich people's playground? Art and artists alike are made into commodities. While I love thinking about this I'm not sure if we ended up anywhere new here. There seemed to be some set up for questioning borders and legality and there was something building up about class and race lines, but these ideas weren't explored to the fullest. Instead we get a tired cheating story with some of the most annoying characters around (Alice, please, get a backbone!) and I'm left to wonder if I'm supposed to believe anything that's happening or am I supposed to question it.
I did love the writing here and Kunzru does create characters that are fully formed, just be ready to hate all of their choices. My favorite parts of the book were the flashbacks, reading about that late 90s/early aughts YBA era felt real and brought back memories. I also fell for Jay’s struggles with his backbreaking work around the world - which also seems to work on the rich people in the 2020 storyline. This is when the characters and conversations become too cliched for me, making me question what the point is beyond excess leading to a false reality that must be kept up.
This was a fascinating but frustrating read.
September 1, 2024
We are all calling this novel the third in a "loose trilogy" because Kunzru's previous two novels also have "color" titles. And I can see how this fits with the other two in some ways, but it doesn't fit more than it does. These novels are all about artists, about class, about envy, about fear. Perhaps the similarities of the first two novels, which both have this amplifying dread and become basically horror novels by their conclusions, set up expectations? But the third does not really fit, though it has its own minor tensions, a smaller version of what the previous two did.
Regardless of the comparisons, this one had discrete pieces I enjoyed but never came together for me as a novel. Our protagonist, Jay, is a former performance artist who left that world, getting by now as an invisible undocumented person in the US. After getting Covid early in the pandemic, he was kicked out of the housing he shared with several other undocumented men, and now sleeping in his car, finds himself delivering groceries to a lavish estate. The recipient just happens to be his ex-girlfriend Alice from his artist days.
We spend a lot of time going back and forth from the present to their past. The art is well done (so many novelists write about art, but so few of them manage to make the art actually interesting and Kunzru succeeds here) and the scenes of squalor and creation are quite vivid. Jay's best friend during these days is Rob, who happens to be Alice's now husband. There is tension between Jay and both of these other two. Rob is a fellow starving artist, but has the bluster and carefree disregard of a white boy. Alice and Jay are both people of color and stand out in their crowd, but Alice comes from money, and is struggling to minimize contact with her family while also not willing to leave their funding her life. Jay's surprising success ripples out among these relationships, but is also a struggle for Jay. He wants to be an artist but he does not want to have to perform on command for payment. His work pushes up against capitalism while also providing a paycheck and the conflict seems unsustainable.
In the present, Jay is almost a cipher. We know very little of how he's spent the last few decades, or any of the characters. His lingering Covid symptoms make it difficult for him to have many desires beyond the most basic physical needs. He starts to recover, to find and appreciate art and beauty again, while Alice hides him away on the vast property. But of course a conflict is coming.
I wish Kunzru had more to push here about that art and capitalism conflict that felt different. Jay's journey is interesting but we only get the very beginning of it, not anything that came after. And Rob is more cliche than anything else, not fully explored. We never understand why Alice, who we know is smart and capable, has chosen to spend her life cleaning up after Rob. And so much of this is left unexplored that I had more questions than answers in this book.
There is a lot to enjoy here, but it didn't come together the way I'd hoped, it didn't throw big ideas at me or explore them with the kind of wit and nuance I expect from Kunzru. It's a quiet book with these sections of loud roaring interspersed along the way.
Regardless of the comparisons, this one had discrete pieces I enjoyed but never came together for me as a novel. Our protagonist, Jay, is a former performance artist who left that world, getting by now as an invisible undocumented person in the US. After getting Covid early in the pandemic, he was kicked out of the housing he shared with several other undocumented men, and now sleeping in his car, finds himself delivering groceries to a lavish estate. The recipient just happens to be his ex-girlfriend Alice from his artist days.
We spend a lot of time going back and forth from the present to their past. The art is well done (so many novelists write about art, but so few of them manage to make the art actually interesting and Kunzru succeeds here) and the scenes of squalor and creation are quite vivid. Jay's best friend during these days is Rob, who happens to be Alice's now husband. There is tension between Jay and both of these other two. Rob is a fellow starving artist, but has the bluster and carefree disregard of a white boy. Alice and Jay are both people of color and stand out in their crowd, but Alice comes from money, and is struggling to minimize contact with her family while also not willing to leave their funding her life. Jay's surprising success ripples out among these relationships, but is also a struggle for Jay. He wants to be an artist but he does not want to have to perform on command for payment. His work pushes up against capitalism while also providing a paycheck and the conflict seems unsustainable.
In the present, Jay is almost a cipher. We know very little of how he's spent the last few decades, or any of the characters. His lingering Covid symptoms make it difficult for him to have many desires beyond the most basic physical needs. He starts to recover, to find and appreciate art and beauty again, while Alice hides him away on the vast property. But of course a conflict is coming.
I wish Kunzru had more to push here about that art and capitalism conflict that felt different. Jay's journey is interesting but we only get the very beginning of it, not anything that came after. And Rob is more cliche than anything else, not fully explored. We never understand why Alice, who we know is smart and capable, has chosen to spend her life cleaning up after Rob. And so much of this is left unexplored that I had more questions than answers in this book.
There is a lot to enjoy here, but it didn't come together the way I'd hoped, it didn't throw big ideas at me or explore them with the kind of wit and nuance I expect from Kunzru. It's a quiet book with these sections of loud roaring interspersed along the way.
March 10, 2024
When Jay delivers a pizza order on that fateful day during Covid, Alice is shocked to see him. She lives with Rob, has been married for many years with a 15 year old child but still remembers their time together. Years ago, Jay, Alice and Rob were students in art school in London.
A series of flashbacks begin to shed light on what happened in the past as we slowly see what happened to Jay, who once had it all and was a star in the Art World. The beginning is a slow burn but the last third is swift. A telling tale on Art, society and excess (and Covid) highly recommend! So Creepy and claustrophobic.
A great edition to the pandemic books! #harikunzru #KnopfPantheonVintageandAnchor, #Knopf
A series of flashbacks begin to shed light on what happened in the past as we slowly see what happened to Jay, who once had it all and was a star in the Art World. The beginning is a slow burn but the last third is swift. A telling tale on Art, society and excess (and Covid) highly recommend! So Creepy and claustrophobic.
A great edition to the pandemic books! #harikunzru #KnopfPantheonVintageandAnchor, #Knopf
July 12, 2024
Em "Ruína Azul", conhecemos o mundo da arte contemporânea, pela perspetiva de Jay, um artista que procura reconhecimento. Também conhecemos a cena artística londrina, desde as galerias badaladas até os ateliês decadentes, capturando a energia vibrante e a atmosfera caótica desse meio.
A história desenvolve-se através de flashbacks, alternando entre o presente e o passado de Jay, enquanto se depara com duras realidades no mundo da arte e a sua atual situação em que está doente e reencontra Alice.
O livro levanta questões importantes sobre o papel da arte na sociedade, a influência do dinheiro no mundo artístico e a responsabilidade social do artista.
A escrita do autor captura bem a essência da vida boémia artística e os dilemas existenciais que permeiam a vida de Jay.
Apesar de, no geral, ter gostado, houve alguns pontos menos bons. A estrutura temporal fragmentada e o ritmo da narrativa, que varia entre momentos de ação acelerada e reflexões filosóficas mais lentas, dificultaram um pouco a fluidez da leitura.
É uma obra que recomendo a quem gosta ficção literária complexa e reflexões sobre o mundo da arte.
A história desenvolve-se através de flashbacks, alternando entre o presente e o passado de Jay, enquanto se depara com duras realidades no mundo da arte e a sua atual situação em que está doente e reencontra Alice.
O livro levanta questões importantes sobre o papel da arte na sociedade, a influência do dinheiro no mundo artístico e a responsabilidade social do artista.
A escrita do autor captura bem a essência da vida boémia artística e os dilemas existenciais que permeiam a vida de Jay.
Apesar de, no geral, ter gostado, houve alguns pontos menos bons. A estrutura temporal fragmentada e o ritmo da narrativa, que varia entre momentos de ação acelerada e reflexões filosóficas mais lentas, dificultaram um pouco a fluidez da leitura.
É uma obra que recomendo a quem gosta ficção literária complexa e reflexões sobre o mundo da arte.
March 6, 2024
3.5
Major thanks to Knopf for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts:
Yet another pandemic book, but this time on the reflections of art. What is art in emergency? Habits? Disciplines? How do they conflict with real life? Love? Kunzru has a beautiful way of forming characters as if from clay. They mold, mend, and become people much like us, artists I know, habits that bother me, little quirks that, in the end, tally up to perhaps not the great life they wish they lived, but a life nonetheless. A life full, a life presented and represented.
What is art but a tidy presentation of life and the living?
Major thanks to Knopf for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts:
Yet another pandemic book, but this time on the reflections of art. What is art in emergency? Habits? Disciplines? How do they conflict with real life? Love? Kunzru has a beautiful way of forming characters as if from clay. They mold, mend, and become people much like us, artists I know, habits that bother me, little quirks that, in the end, tally up to perhaps not the great life they wish they lived, but a life nonetheless. A life full, a life presented and represented.
What is art but a tidy presentation of life and the living?
May 15, 2024
I found this novel to be a self indulgent exploration by a bunch of immature kids, who become mal adjusted immature adults, about art and what it means to them. While the idealism during the college years can be forgiven, the lack of self awareness or understanding of the world around them and how it functions, cannot. There isn’t even a contrast or redemption for these characters as adults since they continue to inhabit their selfish and narcissistic lives without any growth or evolution.
June 22, 2025
An engaging novel about London Art school students as they proceed on different paths: Jay, of mixed race, who becomes more interested in performance art critiquing the commodification of creativity and Rob who is bent on doing whatever it takes to “ make it” as a successful painter. Jay meets a wealthy Asian girl interested in becoming a curator and the two embark on a dark, drug laden relationship that ends with the two of them strung out.
The novel opens with them all coming together some twenty years later now in the Hudson Valley north of New York where Alice and Rob have escaped the pandemic and are holed up with an art dealer and his girlfriend. From out of nowhere appears Jay making a go of it as an essential worker delivering food and living out of his car.
Jay reawakens his analysis of the meaning of art summarized as…”I wanted an art which was just another thing in the world, that didn’t try and tell a story, or draw attention to its maker…there are reasons for an artist to take credit for their work, mostly to do with money. Few of those reasons add anything to the experience of the art itself…there are reasons work of all artists- was an alibi for the desire to put a frame around a certain part of life, to declare that inside the frame was art, and out side was not. The inside followed a certain rules, was worthy of a certain kind of attention. I wondered what an artist would look like that didn’t sit inside a frame, that bled out into life’s messiness and uncertainty. And that didn’t have a border.”
Hari Kunzru raises interesting thoughts about the commercialism of art. This is a well paced novel, with well drawn characters, and tension that takes place in the midst of a worldwide time of anxiety and uncertainty.
The novel opens with them all coming together some twenty years later now in the Hudson Valley north of New York where Alice and Rob have escaped the pandemic and are holed up with an art dealer and his girlfriend. From out of nowhere appears Jay making a go of it as an essential worker delivering food and living out of his car.
Jay reawakens his analysis of the meaning of art summarized as…”I wanted an art which was just another thing in the world, that didn’t try and tell a story, or draw attention to its maker…there are reasons for an artist to take credit for their work, mostly to do with money. Few of those reasons add anything to the experience of the art itself…there are reasons work of all artists- was an alibi for the desire to put a frame around a certain part of life, to declare that inside the frame was art, and out side was not. The inside followed a certain rules, was worthy of a certain kind of attention. I wondered what an artist would look like that didn’t sit inside a frame, that bled out into life’s messiness and uncertainty. And that didn’t have a border.”
Hari Kunzru raises interesting thoughts about the commercialism of art. This is a well paced novel, with well drawn characters, and tension that takes place in the midst of a worldwide time of anxiety and uncertainty.
January 2, 2025
Loved the artsy narrative. Reminded me of another book I read last year! Great read and so well written!!
June 4, 2024
I enjoyed this for the discussions of contemporary art and the characters, some of whom are almost parodies. The audiobook is nicely read by Kunzru himself.
July 28, 2024
Set during the recent pandemic, Jay, a former artist, now in financial straits, meets a former girlfriend, Alice, while delivering her groceries. Jay went to art school with Alice’s husband, Rob. Jay quit performance art due to his discomfort with its monetization. Rob is still painting and has become quite successful. Though set in the pandemic times, it is not a “pandemic novel.” The pandemic is a device to get these three characters together in an isolated setting.
The novel explores the push-pull relationship of business to art. Artists want to feel free to create, but if they are not able to make money, it gets pretty difficult to be a “pure” artist (as opposed to someone who makes money at other things and creates art in their spare time). It also explores art in terms of evaluation – what is “good” art – what defines “success” in the art world? Is art defined by a small group of wealthy elitist collectors?
There is a love triangle amongst Jay, Alice, and Rob, and a good portion of the book flashes back to tell of Jay’s relationship and breakup with Alice, and how Rob and Alice got together. This was less interesting to me than the present-day story of “unsuccessful” Jay, “successful” Rob, and Alice serving as a small player in Rob’s egotistical life. There is also a component of race for both Jay and Alice, which is not explored in any depth.
In the end, I have mixed feelings. The quality of the writing is excellent, but I did not care much for the love triangle. I did not like this one as much as others I have read by this author, White Tears and Red Pill. Still, I enjoy Kunzru’s writing and plan to read more of his works. His novels examine complex ideas and I always find them thought-provoking.
The novel explores the push-pull relationship of business to art. Artists want to feel free to create, but if they are not able to make money, it gets pretty difficult to be a “pure” artist (as opposed to someone who makes money at other things and creates art in their spare time). It also explores art in terms of evaluation – what is “good” art – what defines “success” in the art world? Is art defined by a small group of wealthy elitist collectors?
There is a love triangle amongst Jay, Alice, and Rob, and a good portion of the book flashes back to tell of Jay’s relationship and breakup with Alice, and how Rob and Alice got together. This was less interesting to me than the present-day story of “unsuccessful” Jay, “successful” Rob, and Alice serving as a small player in Rob’s egotistical life. There is also a component of race for both Jay and Alice, which is not explored in any depth.
In the end, I have mixed feelings. The quality of the writing is excellent, but I did not care much for the love triangle. I did not like this one as much as others I have read by this author, White Tears and Red Pill. Still, I enjoy Kunzru’s writing and plan to read more of his works. His novels examine complex ideas and I always find them thought-provoking.
September 9, 2024
"I realized that my work, and not just my work, everyone's work, the work of all artists was an alibi for the desire to put a frame around a certain part of life. To declare the inside the frame was art and outside was not. The inside followed certain rules, was worthy of a certain kind of attention. I [wanted to make art that] didn't sit inside a frame, that bled out into life’s messiness and uncertainty. Art that didn't have a border."
"Blue Ruin" is an excellent novel about art: the meaning, the making, the status, the performance, the commodification, its pollution. I may not be a performance artist, or painter, or have to live off my writing, but I identified with the MC when he talked about how sometimes the act of creation becomes competitive, how aiming to make something "artful" can destroy the pleasure of creation and experiencing art. "When I went to shows, I found that I couldn’t look at painting anymore. I tried to enjoy it, to take pleasure in color and form, but all I saw were tricks and mannerisms. The drips and spatters and foe accidental marks seemed calculated and cynical, a way to con some collector into believing he bought a flame in a bottle, a trace of the artist's life force." The characters are trapped in a perpetual performance of authenticity; the parallels with Jay's experience as a biracial man, trying to perform his white or black self safely was extra poignant. And while everyone's trying to out-perform one another in an isolated location during the pandemic, while meaning and depth are being chased, the outside world is preparing for the monumental BLM protests following George Floyd's death. I loved how the author dwarfed the scale of the characters' drama by juxtaposing it briefly against real world events. Ironically, the book made me scared of writing this very review, afraid I'll look like a fraud pretending to understand the deep meaning of this work of art, while I'm grasping desperately for serious words. I love it! And also want to stop early before I say something that makes me sound foolish :). One of the best novels I've read this year.
"Blue Ruin" is an excellent novel about art: the meaning, the making, the status, the performance, the commodification, its pollution. I may not be a performance artist, or painter, or have to live off my writing, but I identified with the MC when he talked about how sometimes the act of creation becomes competitive, how aiming to make something "artful" can destroy the pleasure of creation and experiencing art. "When I went to shows, I found that I couldn’t look at painting anymore. I tried to enjoy it, to take pleasure in color and form, but all I saw were tricks and mannerisms. The drips and spatters and foe accidental marks seemed calculated and cynical, a way to con some collector into believing he bought a flame in a bottle, a trace of the artist's life force." The characters are trapped in a perpetual performance of authenticity; the parallels with Jay's experience as a biracial man, trying to perform his white or black self safely was extra poignant. And while everyone's trying to out-perform one another in an isolated location during the pandemic, while meaning and depth are being chased, the outside world is preparing for the monumental BLM protests following George Floyd's death. I loved how the author dwarfed the scale of the characters' drama by juxtaposing it briefly against real world events. Ironically, the book made me scared of writing this very review, afraid I'll look like a fraud pretending to understand the deep meaning of this work of art, while I'm grasping desperately for serious words. I love it! And also want to stop early before I say something that makes me sound foolish :). One of the best novels I've read this year.
May 13, 2024
gifted by the publisher & prhaudio
What is the meaning of one's life if not measured by dollar signs? With lush, gorgeous prose that invites introspection, Kunzru asks readers to reflect on the cultural valuation of art and the commodification of human experiences through Jay, a former artist turned undocumented essential worker during the pandemic.
Through the lens of the art world, BLUE RUIN delves into themes of consumerism, performance, and the search for meaning in a world driven by profit, reminiscent of MEMORY PIECE (Lisa Ko). The exploration of the blurred lines between artist and artwork raises questions about the nature of artistic creation and the extent to which we can truly know an artist's intentions.
BLUE RUIN is an intellectually stimulating novel that rewards careful consideration and reflection. I recommend this story to readers who enjoy delving into complex themes and abstract narratives.
What is the meaning of one's life if not measured by dollar signs? With lush, gorgeous prose that invites introspection, Kunzru asks readers to reflect on the cultural valuation of art and the commodification of human experiences through Jay, a former artist turned undocumented essential worker during the pandemic.
Through the lens of the art world, BLUE RUIN delves into themes of consumerism, performance, and the search for meaning in a world driven by profit, reminiscent of MEMORY PIECE (Lisa Ko). The exploration of the blurred lines between artist and artwork raises questions about the nature of artistic creation and the extent to which we can truly know an artist's intentions.
BLUE RUIN is an intellectually stimulating novel that rewards careful consideration and reflection. I recommend this story to readers who enjoy delving into complex themes and abstract narratives.
November 6, 2023
ARC for review. TBP May 14, 2024.
Jay, Alice and Rob all attended art school together in London. Now Jay is delivering groceries and living in his car, barely surviving. One fateful day he makes a delivery….to Alice, his former lover and Rob, the man she left him for. The two are holed up in a luxury estate along with Marshal and Nicole, isolating from COVID. This intersection with the past floors Jay and has fateful consequences for all.
Good book with a great sense of place (so long as you can get over the total long shot that Jay would have run into Alice and Rob in America.). The whole thing felt creepy and claustrophobic, which I’m assuming was the author’s intent. I enjoyed it.
Jay, Alice and Rob all attended art school together in London. Now Jay is delivering groceries and living in his car, barely surviving. One fateful day he makes a delivery….to Alice, his former lover and Rob, the man she left him for. The two are holed up in a luxury estate along with Marshal and Nicole, isolating from COVID. This intersection with the past floors Jay and has fateful consequences for all.
Good book with a great sense of place (so long as you can get over the total long shot that Jay would have run into Alice and Rob in America.). The whole thing felt creepy and claustrophobic, which I’m assuming was the author’s intent. I enjoyed it.
June 19, 2024
I had not read Hari Kunzru before, and see from many here that Blue Ruin is very different from his previous novels. Perhaps I should try again, but this one frustrated me. Will also note that I was late to learn Blue Ruin is the third in a trilogy - having not read the preceding 2 novels, I can’t say if the appearance of the pandemic might seem more fitting as part of a triptych, though surely the author would also want the pieces to work individually.
This is the 4th “Covid novel” I’ve read. No - the 5th! (omitted Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, my favourite). It’s understandable why the lockdown period is proving so tempting to novelists; groups of people thrown into living together in an emergency situation, not knowing what world they’ll return to or when; sometimes strangers, and sometimes - as with Blue Ruin - old friendships or connections suddenly, forcibly, reforged.
Blue Ruin is narrated rather dejectedly by Jay. Once an up and coming British artist (“performance artist”, quotations definitely my own) Jay now lives out of his van and makes a paltry living delivering groceries. The book opens with one such job, bringing with it a sudden, unexpected reunion, an invitation inside a luxurious home, and we’re off, however slowly, from there.
It’s an interesting premise, albeit somewhat contrived, someone in hard times making a delivery to a random home, only to have the door opened by someone from their past, a woman who knew them when they were younger and doing very well. Her quickly inviting him to stay with her and her entirely objectionable wealthy husband stretches credulity: feeling ill, Jay confesses his circumstances - he’s just had covid, badly - is living rough, and she says blithely, “Don’t be absurd, that’s over. You won’t have to do *that* again. Are you hungry? Let’s go see if the girls have rustled up some food.”
(Somehow this is a Covid novel where Covid just gets in the way.)
The setup doesn’t pay off. Jay is an exasperating person, alternately berating himself for his failures over the years, then sliding back into his more usual mode of mirror gazing, self adoration. He recalls his career with such self importance and immaturity that I struggled to land on whether we were meant to take Jay seriously or if Kunzru was creating a caricature. Neither seemed to really coalesce.
“I wanted to deform the art world by not being there,”Jay muses. (“Oh, if only,” one imagines others thinking).
“I’d wanted to live without an artistic identity, but at the same time, to live completely entirely within the frame of art.”
The “frame of art”? It’s me, right, surely I’m meant to be amused here? Mais non.
The endless telling of his history at a supposed dinner party - a party turned one man show - goes on interminably, achingly self indulgent and dull. This is repeated: characters relating their pasts stop sounding like human beings in conversation or even speaking a believable monologue. Pages to plow through that could almost be old fashioned stage directions (before play scripts were /conformed/ to blank
spaces). It’s as though the author is annotating what he planned to actually write, but left in notes-to-self form.
What I liked: the details of the surroundings, the tactile and sensory feel of the country house, the barn, the fields. These elements made me wonder if I should try another Kunzru novel. But the interaction between this anti-hero and his temporary benefactors is all quite heavy and plodding. There are baked in examinations of wealth and race, gun rights and violent wrongs. Sorry, I’m itchy to finish. Nothing very much happens, until it does, by which time I was, as I said, itchy. And tired.
This is the 4th “Covid novel” I’ve read. No - the 5th! (omitted Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, my favourite). It’s understandable why the lockdown period is proving so tempting to novelists; groups of people thrown into living together in an emergency situation, not knowing what world they’ll return to or when; sometimes strangers, and sometimes - as with Blue Ruin - old friendships or connections suddenly, forcibly, reforged.
Blue Ruin is narrated rather dejectedly by Jay. Once an up and coming British artist (“performance artist”, quotations definitely my own) Jay now lives out of his van and makes a paltry living delivering groceries. The book opens with one such job, bringing with it a sudden, unexpected reunion, an invitation inside a luxurious home, and we’re off, however slowly, from there.
It’s an interesting premise, albeit somewhat contrived, someone in hard times making a delivery to a random home, only to have the door opened by someone from their past, a woman who knew them when they were younger and doing very well. Her quickly inviting him to stay with her and her entirely objectionable wealthy husband stretches credulity: feeling ill, Jay confesses his circumstances - he’s just had covid, badly - is living rough, and she says blithely, “Don’t be absurd, that’s over. You won’t have to do *that* again. Are you hungry? Let’s go see if the girls have rustled up some food.”
(Somehow this is a Covid novel where Covid just gets in the way.)
The setup doesn’t pay off. Jay is an exasperating person, alternately berating himself for his failures over the years, then sliding back into his more usual mode of mirror gazing, self adoration. He recalls his career with such self importance and immaturity that I struggled to land on whether we were meant to take Jay seriously or if Kunzru was creating a caricature. Neither seemed to really coalesce.
“I wanted to deform the art world by not being there,”Jay muses. (“Oh, if only,” one imagines others thinking).
“I’d wanted to live without an artistic identity, but at the same time, to live completely entirely within the frame of art.”
The “frame of art”? It’s me, right, surely I’m meant to be amused here? Mais non.
The endless telling of his history at a supposed dinner party - a party turned one man show - goes on interminably, achingly self indulgent and dull. This is repeated: characters relating their pasts stop sounding like human beings in conversation or even speaking a believable monologue. Pages to plow through that could almost be old fashioned stage directions (before play scripts were /conformed/ to blank
spaces). It’s as though the author is annotating what he planned to actually write, but left in notes-to-self form.
What I liked: the details of the surroundings, the tactile and sensory feel of the country house, the barn, the fields. These elements made me wonder if I should try another Kunzru novel. But the interaction between this anti-hero and his temporary benefactors is all quite heavy and plodding. There are baked in examinations of wealth and race, gun rights and violent wrongs. Sorry, I’m itchy to finish. Nothing very much happens, until it does, by which time I was, as I said, itchy. And tired.
January 19, 2025
Wat een briljante roman!
2020, Corona raast over de wereld. In New York wordt taxichauffeur Jay door zijn huisbaas uit huis gezet als hij besmet blijkt. Terwijl hij hartstikke ziek is, probeert hij vanuit zijn auto te overleven. Hij gaat aan de slag als boodschappenbezorger. Zo komt hij op een dag op een landgoed een bestelling afleveren en tot zijn verbijstering komt hij daar zijn vroegere vriendin Alice tegen. Alice ziet dat Jay heel ziek is en verschaft hem stiekem een schuilplek in een schuur verderop op het landgoed. Daar ziekt Jay uit.
Ondertussen gaan we terug naar het Londen van de jaren ‘90, waar Jay de uit een zeer rijke familie afkomstige Alice ontmoet tijdens zijn studie aan de kunstacademie. Hun van drank en drugs doortrokken relatie loopt stuk als Alice er met zijn mede-student en beste vriend Rob vandoor gaat. Jay probeert de restanten van zijn leven bij elkaar te vegen.
Flash foward twintig jaar. Alice blijkt in de States nog steeds met Rob te zijn. En langzamerhand worden de tussenliggende jaren ingekleurd en raken verleden en heden elkaar tot het tot een apotheose komt om u tegen te zeggen.
Een roman over hoe afkomst, geld en (voor)oordelen relaties beïnvloeden. En hoe van geld en kontlikkerij de kunstwereld in elkaar zit. Schitterend geschreven ook nog. Een dikke vijf sterren!
2020, Corona raast over de wereld. In New York wordt taxichauffeur Jay door zijn huisbaas uit huis gezet als hij besmet blijkt. Terwijl hij hartstikke ziek is, probeert hij vanuit zijn auto te overleven. Hij gaat aan de slag als boodschappenbezorger. Zo komt hij op een dag op een landgoed een bestelling afleveren en tot zijn verbijstering komt hij daar zijn vroegere vriendin Alice tegen. Alice ziet dat Jay heel ziek is en verschaft hem stiekem een schuilplek in een schuur verderop op het landgoed. Daar ziekt Jay uit.
Ondertussen gaan we terug naar het Londen van de jaren ‘90, waar Jay de uit een zeer rijke familie afkomstige Alice ontmoet tijdens zijn studie aan de kunstacademie. Hun van drank en drugs doortrokken relatie loopt stuk als Alice er met zijn mede-student en beste vriend Rob vandoor gaat. Jay probeert de restanten van zijn leven bij elkaar te vegen.
Flash foward twintig jaar. Alice blijkt in de States nog steeds met Rob te zijn. En langzamerhand worden de tussenliggende jaren ingekleurd en raken verleden en heden elkaar tot het tot een apotheose komt om u tegen te zeggen.
Een roman over hoe afkomst, geld en (voor)oordelen relaties beïnvloeden. En hoe van geld en kontlikkerij de kunstwereld in elkaar zit. Schitterend geschreven ook nog. Een dikke vijf sterren!
July 4, 2024
Blue Ruin is the name of the painting that turns up late in the book.
It's sitting on display as two of the main characters..Rob /artist who seemingly has had his best days and one time friend Jay/ who everyone thought was dead and may have by disappearing completed his most iconic work of art..chat.
Plus there's a gun involved.
The third character ..not surprisingly is a woman Alice...one time Jay's girlfriend who left him and is now Rob's wife of some twenty years.
There are all in a Covid quarantined Estate in the US.
Just like the Art world it portrays it can be frustrating ..but can be a compelling read and has some 'touch the nerve' insights about the nature of creating art and the fuss surrounding that process
It's sitting on display as two of the main characters..Rob /artist who seemingly has had his best days and one time friend Jay/ who everyone thought was dead and may have by disappearing completed his most iconic work of art..chat.
Plus there's a gun involved.
The third character ..not surprisingly is a woman Alice...one time Jay's girlfriend who left him and is now Rob's wife of some twenty years.
There are all in a Covid quarantined Estate in the US.
Just like the Art world it portrays it can be frustrating ..but can be a compelling read and has some 'touch the nerve' insights about the nature of creating art and the fuss surrounding that process
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