Red Pill: A novel

by Hari Kunzru

A  NEW YORK TIMES  NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

A bold new novel about searching for order in a world that frames madness as truth f rom the widely acclaimed author of  White Tears

After receiving a prestigious writing fellowship in Germany, the narrator of  Red Pill  arrives in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and struggles to accomplish anything at all. Instead of working on the book he has proposed to write, he takes long walks and binge-watches Blue Lives , a violent cop show that becomes weirdly compelling in its bleak, Darwinian view of life. He soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all.
 
Wannsee is full of Across the lake, the narrator can see the villa where the Nazis planned the Final Solution, and in his walks he passes the grave of the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, who killed himself after deciding that “no happiness was possible here on earth.” At a party, he meets the charismatic Anton, creator of  Blue Lives , and the narrator begins to believe that the two of them are engaged in a cosmic battle. Anton is “red-pilling” his viewers—turning them toward an ugly, alt-rightish worldview, he thinks, as he starts to wonder if he is losing his mind.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Politics, Audiobook, Germany

304 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2020

About the author

Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru (born 1969) is a British novelist and journalist, author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission and My Revolutions. Of mixed English and Kashmiri Pandit ancestry, he grew up in Essex. He studied English at Wadham College, Oxford University, then gained an MA in Philosophy and Literature from Warwick University. His work has been translated into twenty languages. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a spectacle, a wild romp, insanely intelligent, full of references and meta-levels and ideas - just give Hari Kunzru this year's Booker, will ya! Our narrator and protagonist is an unnamed NY-based writer struggling to produce new work - this is starting to affect his marriage, so when he obtains a stipend for a fellowship at the Deuter Center in Berlin, he perceives it as an opportunity to overcome his troubles by distancing himself from his usual environment. His application stated that he wants to do research on the subjectivity of lyric poets, but his own self falls apart as his stay turns into a disaster: He is confronted with the Center's oppressive policies of transparency and openness, disturbed by the destiny of a cleaning woman who was tormented by and working for the Stasi, haunted by the recurring sight of a poor refugee and his daughter, and when he finally ventures into the heart of the city, he meets an alt-right activist who plays with his mind - or doesn't he?

Our unreliable narrator starts from a place of mental instability and vulnerability and is again and again confronted with ideologies and belief systems that challenge his world views, namely the importance of human dignity, which drives him mad: He is shaken to the core by the loss of moral certainties, going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, liberal and alt-right filter bubbles, fake news and real threats to democracy and the values of the Enlightenment. (Needless to say that at some point, Trump will enter the narrative.) There is a real shift happening, there are real dangers to the way of life we know, the values we hold dear - Kunzru explores the friction between understandable fear and paranoia and how people can be pushed over the edge, drowning in quicksand, questioning the very concept of reality.

The text operates with an abundance of motifs and themes and cleverly connects them, thus creating an exciting narrative puzzle: The founder of the (fictional) Deuter Center, a former Wehrmacht general, became a successful entrepreneur in postwar Germany, rich and lauded by politicians, his signature product being a white color with extreme opacity (can you cover up your war crimes in the name of white supremacy by inventing an opaque white color? And btw: There really is a well-known German company named Deuter, and they produce backpacks, so you can, you know, carry around your baggage - Hari Kunzru, evil genius). The premises Kunzru describes in the context of the Deuter Center are actually those of the American Academy where the author spent some time; it is located at the Wannsee, so where the Wannsee conference was held and Reinhard Heydrich proposed the "final solution to the Jewish question" - history is haunting the people we meet in this story (the GDR and its system of surveillance and oppression also plays a pivotal role).

While sitting in his room and struggling with the Center's ideologically rigid regulations that strictly monitor his output and contributions, the protagonist becomes obsessed with Heinrich von Kleist, who shot himself at the Wannsee in a murder-suicide plot with Henriette Vogel. Again and again, he wanders to Kleist's nearby grave, ponders the poet's hysteric disposition and contemplates his work, namely The Prince of Homburg and The Marquise of O - as the story goes on, he partly starts to mirror Kleist, and while the novella isn't explicitly mentioned, Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas seems to be a steady companion piece to the narrator's upcoming crusade (you could also make a case for The Broken Jug). The many references to German literature (including Goethe's über-famous Wanderer's Nightsong II, e.g.) and politics (not only to WW II and the GDR, but also to the Wirtschaftswunder and the RAF, e.g.) can easily be decoded and (re-)contextualized by Germans, and I'm curious how readers from other countries will perceive it. Hari Kunzru does a fantastic job working with these themes and depicting Germany, IMHO.

Another pastime of the narrator is watching a nihilistic cop show which, as it turns out, was created by Anton, the alt-right activist who will become his nemesis: The show, the narrator muses, is intended to prepare us all for the upcoming world without empathy - which made me think of the Alfred Hugenberg who turned the Universum Film AG (UFA) into one of the biggest propaganda tools of the Nazis. And where does the protagonist encounter the enigmatic alt-right troll? Of course: At the Berlinale. The narrator becomes obsessed with Anton, his opinions mess with his mind, and he starts to unravel...

The protagonist is half-Indian and married to a woman with Japanese heritage, just like Kunzru (his wife is writer Katie Kitamura) - and in a way, most of us will probably feel connected to the narrator, who has to witness how people who despise his values (empathy, honesty, solidarity etc.) and celebrate a dog-eat-dog mentality in which debasing others is a legitimate display of power gain more and more power (hello, Trump-GOP and AfD). Will the Enlightenment be reversed, will our democracies collapse (again)? Kunzru meditates about the connection between the human penchant for mysticism (Norse mythology, German Romanticism, etc.), the power of manipulation and the disorientation we are currently experiencing. The title-giving "red pill" refers to the concept explained in "The Matrix" (the narrator also talks about the world as "simulation"): Morpheus offers Neo the choice between a blue pill (blissful ignorance) and a red pill (true reality) - you can watch the scene here.

I could go on and on about the many ideas the author has played out in this work - this is a fascinating, smart, timely read. I hope many people will pick it up and Kunzru will get lots of recognition for it.

You can learn more about the German translation (also titled "Red Pill") in our latest podcast episode.

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

2-8-21: While reading the newest Booker longlisted "Twitter" novel, another piece of fiction said to engage poignantly with our interesting times, in my mind I just keep coming back to this book. Upping this to a four star, very thought-provoking and so real as to be scary, read

Intellectual, but uneven and highly navel-gazing with the exception of the East-German part
By generating a sort of paratactical blizzard of obscure cultural references and inviting my reader to fall through with it

Wannsee or the Sorrows of our middle-class, progressive, procrastinating "writer who won a prestigious fellowship"
I’m supposed to be making myself happy

In Red Pill we follow a main character who has won a scholarship at a German research institute to write about Romantic poets. He hails from New York and leaves his human rights lawyer wife and young daughter to go to Europe for a few months of undisturbed work. At the facility, besides the Wannsee (of the infamous conference) in Berlin, the narrator reflects on a suicide of one of his subject of research, a poet who walked into the lake and shot his girlfriend and himself. Soon enough it becomes apparent that the mental state of our writer is also not in the best of shapes.

The main character feels in this first part very, very self aware and rather whiny, like he goes on about the impossibility of working in a room with others (I am writer who won a prestigious fellowship, surely I don’t need to be surveyed) and overall he struck me as a bit depressed.
There is some humor to enjoy in the observations on scholarly life and competition in pompous bragging about respective topic (with as highlight a dinner where a combatant attendee is described as: A man like a hammer, looking for a nail). This Edgar is hilarious as an overbearing semi intellectual. Another dinner guest turns out to be using Grindr during the conversation to keep out of theoretical discussions on the merit of various arts and sciences. All people at the institute are keeping up appearances, and our main character is acutely aware that this applies to himself and of his life descending in disorder as well.

But the self pity and constant reflections, paired with inaction, of the main character annoyed me a quite a bit. He goes on and on how he can't turn around on a walk around the lake, how terrible it would be to return on his steps, and then there follows an enormously pretentious reflection on the nature of time.

To pass the time, as a kind of digital opioid, he starts to watch beheading videos and a police violence series called Blue Lives, that seems to be a fusion of Quentin Tarantino and NCIS.
Meanwhile he find every normal thing stressful (I always experience low level panic when I am denied internet access, even if I have no immediate need for it), which led me to the feeling that mental breakdown is a decidedly uninteresting topic to read about. Nowhere does the paranoia the main character experiences about surveillance feel real to me, although there are almost dreamlike scenes that imply surveillance that is very much not in line with GDPR in the research center.

Overall the first part felt to me like a whiney version of Weather from Jenny Offill, a book I recently gave two stars, but around the 20% mark suddenly violence makes an entrance in the story, with a decidedly weird visit to a shooting range for instance. However Hari Kunzru goes flatly against Anton Chekhov's wisdom around showing guns and moves the story in a whole other direction in the second part.

Stasi and modern day alt right descent in the rabbit hole
The texture of her reality was soft, spongey, she wasn’t sure it would hold her weight

The second part, where we are taken into the GDR history (A whole country smelling of piss, schnapps and cabbage) of a staff member of the institute, for me saved the book.
I loved the grays Kunzru painted, in how a society feels where surveillance and betrayal is everywhere (Partial self erasure, to live as if your memories are not yours), and how the tide of history can turn on a rebellious punk girl.
Also this narrator gives a breath of practicality and perspective to the book, with comments like: I clean up your shit, remember?

Then we turn to our original narrator his further descent into disorder, with a delightful satirical portrayal of a movie award ceremony, with an Ai Wei Wei refugee interpretation, insufferable guests and fancy food. This parody on the Berlin Film Festival forms the spark for the main character to get in touch, and obsessed with, the director of Blue Lives.
The party in all its glitter and glamour (She is married with the guy who owns LVMH or Formule1, I can never keep them apart) is furthermore contrasted with a refugee and his small daughter who struggle for food. Again this is an opportunity for our narrator to get further into trouble.

Meanwhile the director of Blue Lives, Anton, turns out to be an alt right quasi intellectual figure with one-liners about the progressive elite like: Their so called morality is just paralysis
Or a comment about a Döner joint like: You want to sit in a toilet with al-Qaeda?
Transhumanism is then presented as a kind of new fascism (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow is a lot more interesting, if not less disturbing, book on this subject).

It's all rather thin, and I can't really feel the existential doubt this encounter gives our main character. Why does a question on the value of human rights open an abyss for the main character?
And in general: how can he just let everything happen, be a bystander to his life and let an Anton figure decide your mental state?
He dives into a conspiracy theorist rabbit hole (or rather: he takes the Red Pill from the title and the Matrix) on the internet, visiting Reddit and white suprematism website, and anonymous internet trolling.
It's an obsession gone The Da Vinci Code at the end. Or maybe Frankenstein: The 1818 Text is a better reference with the main character moving from a lake (Wannsee instead of Lake Geneva) to London and finally a remote island in the North. Also there is an impossibility of communicating, like Viktor Frankenstein.

German Romanticism, awe of Nature and fetishization of suicide are mixed with some Apocalyptic Biblical sauce, to reach a boiling point.

A permanent scar on the normality of life and intimacy
This We of course was really just an I, an universalisation of my own panic

Self Doubt, inadequacy, paranoia. The last part of the book felt a bit like The Humans by Matt Haig, about an alien who tries to be human. Our writer is equally detached from his normal life, he feels like a runaway and abandoner of the normal world and his family. There is wanting to be normal and useful, to be better (I could simulate normalcy with a high degree of precision.

Then there is a scene with an enormous sense of Solipsism just quite randomly.
Quickly followed by a feeling of the end of the liberal world with the election Trump (a very effectively pulled jerk into a specific timeframe, after most of the book seems set in a generic late capitalism setting). These last scenes, making the alt right ideology suddenly very real and much less fringe, felt claustrophobic and had a real emotional impact for me living in 2020 in the run up to the presidential elections.

Overall thoughts and reflections
Stop asking for life to be a poem

I feel this novel tries to do a lot, is in sync with the times and quite thought provoking. Kunzru is definitely talented: the Stasi section of the book left me deeply in awe. Still for me this was a 2,5 star novel.

The main character didn't really work for me, maybe because as he himself notes: I am an articulate person, as long as the topic doesn’t touch me.
I felt hardly any connection with him emotional, and one could say he creates in large part his own suffering. An observation like: It is shameful to be a broken mechanism to have to sit obediently while someone else goed about putting you right is well crafted and elegant, but in the end I wanted to yell too many times the following advice to the narrator, to be able to say I really enjoyed Red Pill:
I don’t usually tell people to think less she said but in your case it might be useful.

[Marchpane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Red Pill meanders from ‘writer writing about writing’, to a punk band’s dealings with the Stasi in East Germany, back to the writer's present day encounters with white supremacists, and his subsequent nervous breakdown, all while counting down to the 2016 U.S. election. There’s a sense of Kunzru simply following where the winds took him, adhering to an atmosphere and a series of concepts rather than following a traditional story structure.

This is such a slippery novel, it’s almost impossible to give a true sense of it. It is at all times realistic, but it has a kind of dream-logic feel that defies description. It’s kind of like taking the haunted mood of White Tears, applying that to the author’s own life, adding some fictional bits, a huge dose of paranoia, and giving the whole thing a good shake.

When the narrator, upon arriving to begin a prestigious writing fellowship at a posh German institute, is dismayed to find he is expected to write in an open plan workspace, it can seem a bit ‘first world problems’. On reflection though, a feeling of panic and existential dread seems an appropriate and reasonable response to working in open plan. And this is Kunzru’s trick: to make the mundane seem sinister, and the sinister appear mundane.

This novel is an exercise in tension. It reminded me of the first part of the movie Get Out, where everything seems normal but there’s just something not quite right… and at any moment things could take a sharp turn. Red Pill creates and holds that tension for the entire length of the book, never quite providing the dramatic twist you think might be just around the corner. It leaves threads dangling and doesn’t give you the payoff you were expecting—it’s more subtle and interesting than that, a textual puzzle that doesn’t sit still long enough be deciphered.

This isn’t a book I’d recommend to everyone. It is in some ways an unsatisfying read as it is so evasive, and it depicts a modern world contaminated with anxiety, nihilism, and hate that is genuinely disturbing. Red Pill offers opacity without solidity, a sense of ground shifting beneath your feet. As such it is an intelligent and unsettling psychological record of life in 2016.

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus) · Rating 2 out of 5]

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Once again, I am in the minority as I did not find Red Pill to be a particularly artful or clever novel. To be clear, I do think that Hari Kunzru can write very well indeed, however, his narrative struck me as all flash and no substance.

I was amused by the first quarter of this novel. Kunzru's writing didn't 'blow' me away but I did find his narrator's inner monologue to be mildly entertaining. Alas, the more I read, the more my interest waned. My mounting frustration at the silliness and superficiality of the story soon morphed into an overwhelming feeling of exasperation. Maybe, this is my fault. The summary, cover, and general 'hype' surrounding this novel led me to believe that Red Pill would be something more than your average 'well-educated yet exceedingly average straight man has midlife crisis in Europe' story but I was wrong.
As per usual, if you enjoyed this novel, well, ben per te. And, at the risk of anticipating righteous Kunzru devotees: No, I did not in fact 'get' this novel.

I'm all for historical and literary references or philosophical asides but boy, oh boy, Red Pill sure liked to flex. Maybe, one needs a master in Philosophy and Literature to understand the brilliance of the narrator's endless ramblings on Kleist, the Enlightenment, western philosophers, postmodern theorists, Evil, self-determination, and violence.
This nameless narrator of ours (of course he remains unnamed) is experiencing some existential dread. This may be because the novel is set in 2016 and our protagonist lives in America. His conviction that 'something' bad is going to happen soon is not unfounded. Suffering writer's block our narrator is given a 'golden' opportunity, a three-months residency at the Deuter Center (located in Wannsee, Berlin). Here he will supposedly be able to crack on his "The Lyric I".
Our narrator was not however prepared for the Deuter Center's many rules. The Center is in fact a "experimental community" that promotes, nay insists, on the "public labor of scholarship". The narrator finds the idea of having to undertake his research in a 'communal' space to be abject. His feelings of discomfort and anxiety are exacerbated by a particularly unpleasant and hectoring resident, a man who relishes in making others miserable, using pseudo-intellectual jargon to 'demolish' their thesis and beliefs. Cowed, our narrator, who is fully aware of his own inability to speak against this bullying man, hides in his bedroom, watching episode after episode of Blue Lives an America show about cops gone 'rogue' and operate under a 'violence begets violence' mentality which sees them torturing and killing criminals.
As the narrator's obsession for this show grows, he starts exhibiting paranoid behaviour. His thoughts too, which are very much convey this sense of 'being watched' or controlled (by the Center? The show? Who knows.).
The narrative then switches to the story of Monika, a cleaner who works at the Center. Monika decides for some reason to make our unremarkable, and increasingly unbalanced, narrator into her confidante. She recounts of her time in a punk girl band in East Germany, and of the way she was persecuted by the Stasi. The story exists solely as a poorly veiled allegory. This novel is not really interest in Monika, and why should it be? This is very much a narrative about an average man's midlife crisis and of his 'descent' into madness.
Pure happenstance, our narrator meets Anton, the creator of Blue Lives, at a party in Berlin. Anton is a 'bad' guy, our narrator is sure of this. Anton does in fact act like a dick, and doesn't bother to conceal his alt-right leanings. This encounter upsets our narrator so much that he looses grip of himself.
What follows is a sequence of fevered events in which our protagonist tries to expose Anton to the world, believing that the best way of doing so is to hurtle down the path of insanity. Paranoia and gas-lightening abound in this part of the novel. Much of what happens seems to exist merely to ridicule our narrator, to emphasise his inability to form cohesive counter-arguments to Anton's Mad Max worldview. He now 'sees' the world in all its ugliest glory, he has indeed taken the 'red pill' mentioned in the title.

The cartoonish characters (the Center guy and Anton are pompous and blustering finger-wagging caricatures) and awkward interactions could be chalked down to Kunzru's predilection for hysterical realism. This is satire. Okay. Fair enough. Still, what lies beneath his 'satire'? An intelligent social commentary? A cautionary tale? Methinks not. The exaggerated characters and outlandish plot did not seem to have anything particularly to say. Beware 'Antons'? Those who hold extremist views and use scholarly or high-register words to deflect their audience from the true meaning of what they are saying? Paranoia is a sane response to an 'insane' reality?
Kunzur's arguments felt tired, especially in 2020, and serve a merely ornamental function. Take the role of the show Blue Lives in the story. Our narrator watches it with a mix of horror and fascination. He worries that no one has caught on the messages that Anton has peppered in his show, particularly a troubling quote by Joseph de Maistre. Our narrator tries to call out Anton, by criticising his show's pessimistic worldview, in which the world is an "abattoir". But that's it. He doesn't try to think why viewers of this show condone this kind of vigilante sort of justice. Kunzru has one quick scene in a kebab shop in which he attempts to unpack the psychology of people like Anton, but he does it in such a harried and obvious way (Anton telling our protagonist why his friends dislike immigrants and non-Western cultural influences), to which our inept narrator responds "fuck you".
Kunzru also tries to show how good intentions can be misunderstood by having our supposedly progressive narrator attempt to help a refugee father and her daughter. Except that his attempt to help them is from the get go dodgy as he wants to prove Anton and his violent worldview wrong.
He's also, surprise surprise, like Monika, made to seem complicit with Anton (so that he's mistaken for a Fascist).
I get that we are not meant to like the narrator (he's kind of a coward, kind of pathetic, kind of a creep when it comes to attractive women), but did the author really have to go out of his way to humiliate him? I already felt little for this man, and the more the story seemed intent on emphasising his many failings, the more I lost interest.
The author seemed more focused on making his narrative as nebulous as possible than of fleshing out or giving some nuance to his characters. Yet, the structure of the novel isn't all that innovative. The plot too unfolds rather predictably. The narrator's unreliability and his imminent breakdown are obvious, and I felt no apprehension about his decline or wellbeing. While the author's prose was exceedingly well-articulated, I failed to grasp the meaning behind his words.
The narrator often recounted the conversations he had with others. Consequently, not only did the plot lack immediacy but the majority of the secondary characters were made to speak only through our narrator recalling the gist of their words (one could say that this is realistic as he is retroactively describing his time in Berlin but why do we get some dialogues then? Am I to believe then he has a sporadic exceptional memory?). The narrator's inner-monologue is repetitive and appeared to be little other than navel-gazing. Many of his thoughts and feelings aren't all that complex, and yet the author will dedicate entire paragraphs to them.
Also, while I understand that there times when you can get so flustered as to be unable to form a cohesive sentence or valid counter-argument (just think how many videos there in which 'liberals/snowflakes/feminists are destroyed with FACTS and LOGIC') it didn't ring quite true when at the Center what's-his-face is offensive towards every single other resident, and no one does anything about it. He wasn't their boss or a threatening guy, yet, not one of these learned individuals was capable of calling him out. His behaviour, as far as I remember, doesn't even get reported (which it should be given that he says inappropriate things, and actively works against the Center's ideology). Speaking of the Center, that felt very much felt like 'bait'. It seems that it will play some sort of role in the novel but it is totally sidelined in favour of our narrator spiralling out of control.
Another thing I couldn't quite behind was Anton and his supposed powers of influence over our main character. While I can recognise that the narrator was in a susceptible, if not vulnerable, state I wasn't convinced by the way Anton comes to dominate his every-thought. The guy may have been able to quote some obscure philosopher but that hardly makes him into almighty persuader.
The 'writing about writing' angle was but underwhelming and obnoxious. If anything, the narrator's reflections on writing seemed to serve as excuses for the actual novel's failings: "Plot is the artificial reduction of life's complexity and randomness. It is a way to give aesthetic form to reality" (insert headache inducing eye-roll here). And of course, Chekhov's gun gets a mention. How very self-aware.
While the protagonist did touch upon interesting subjects and ideas, often using researched vocabulary, he did so superficially, so that ultimately his narration seemed little other than bloviating.

In spite of the novel's lampoon of the academic world, the narrative struck as being extremely elitist. Red Pill tells a meandering and ultimately inadequate story, attempting perhaps to shock or impress its own importance onto its readers. But I felt mostly annoyed by it all. Meaning and depth are lost in a prolix narrative that meanders maddeningly from one subject to the next without having anything substantial to say. Reading this was a huge waste of time, time I could have spent watching ContraPoints or Philosophy Tube. Did the world need another book dedicated to a self-proclaimed 'average' man who is having a 'midlife' crisis?

Read more reviews on my blog / / / View all my reviews on Goodreads

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The reason I read this book - you may laugh - is because it made me think of Haruki Murakami. Not the synopsis but the author's name. First name begins with Ha and ends with I. The surnames are much different but both end with a vowel. And the cover of this book looks like it could be a Haruki Murakami book.

So that's my reason for reading the book and, silly or not, it paid off. It's brilliant! Hari Kunzru can write. I loved this book and, because I don't feel like writing at the moment, that's all I'm gonna say except that aside from exceptionality, there's nothing similar to Haruki Murakami's books.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found Kunzru's White Tears indubitably 'a book of two halves'. The first half – a detailed portrait of two privileged characters with a music-based ghost story mixed in – is excellent: subtle yet thrilling, and totally engrossing. The second half is a jagged stretch of unreality which, while effective in some ways, becomes rather too messy. Nevertheless, I loved the first half of the book so much that I often find myself thinking of it and wishing I could read something that good all the way through. I hoped Red Pill would be exactly that.

The unnamed narrator of Red Pill is a New York-based writer, teacher and new(ish) dad. At the start of the book, he's about to begin a three-month residency at the Deuter Center, a research institute on the banks of Lake Wannsee in the suburbs of Berlin, in the frozen depths of winter. It's a last-ditch attempt to commit to writing a book he's vaguely had in mind for years. It doesn't work; instead, he concentrates his thoughts on three things. Firstly, he becomes somewhat obsessed with the life and work of Heinrich von Kleist, a German Romantic poet who killed himself in Wannsee in 1811. Secondly, he grows increasingly convinced the staff of the Deuter Center are spying on and monitoring him. Thirdly, he binges a violent cop show called Blue Lives and realises that its creator is incorporating the work of obscure philosophers into the dialogue.

For most of its 300-or-so pages, Red Pill is brilliant. It reminded me of everything I loved about the best bits of White Tears, and then some. Kunzru's development of his protagonist is practically a masterclass. There are so many interesting diversions, not least the strong focus on Kleist and the narrator's research for his proposed book (about 'the construction of the self in lyric poetry'). The weird quotes embedded in Blue Lives have the same fascinating nature as the inexplicable song in White Tears, and do the same job of adding a frisson of fantasy to an otherwise realistic story. The three threads – Kleist, Blue Lives and the narrator's paranoia – are combined so brilliantly; woven together in ways I could never have dreamed of. The climax is stunning.

Right in the middle of the book, there's also a detour. The narrator gets talking to Monika, the woman who cleans his room, and she tells him about her youth in East Berlin during the GDR period. It may not have a lot to do with the main narrative (other than to highlight the absurdity of the narrator's suspicions about the Deuter Center), but I loved it. It's a flawless miniature portrait of another world, another life.

So it's not quite another 'book of two halves'. But – there is no nice way to say this, and no point in sugarcoating it – I hated the ending. The story comes to a close on an utterly contrived, anodyne note. I read the book into the early hours of the morning (proof of how gripping I found it) and, after finishing it, lay awake for another hour or so, feeling furiously disappointed and cheated that such an interesting and intelligent story would end with such dull, hackneyed platitudes. After all, we've already been shown the perfect refutation of the narrator's solipsism in the form of Monika's story. And there are several really promising threads that could be picked up and are just... not.

Yet, when push comes to shove, I find it impossible to give the book a low rating when there was so much I liked about it. 95% of it is wonderful. Maybe most other readers will find the ending likeable. (Anyway, if the good-to-bad ratio continues to improve then Kunzru's next book will surely be perfect for me.)

I received an advance review copy of Red Pill from the publisher through NetGalley.

TinyLetter | Linktree

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

It stirred my mind and not my heart, and in this way it was different from any other book I've read this year, and also made it different from my experience of what most literary novels written in English today are trying to achieve. It's so unabashedly intellectual. It doesn't spell it out. It doesn't care if I don't understand everything, or if I draw the wrong conclusions about what the book is supposed to mean. It's the kind of novel that deserves a slow read, and after that a slower re-read.

On its surface it's delightfully entertaining. Even so I followed about half of it. Maybe. Kunzru provides translations for the non-English phrases that he tosses in like croutons, here and there. He doesn't expect me to keep up in three languages. But for the novel's meanings as a whole he has left me without a glossary. I must approve of the way he left me floundering, though, because this novel was without a doubt a 5-star read for me.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hari Kunzru writes a philosophical novel that would probably take three PhDs for me to get to the heart of, but I grasped some of what he was trying to do. I know he's been interested in the rise of fascism and it is the narrator's inability to argue his way out of it, the lack of the tools to see good triumph over evil, that will stick with me the most. I felt in particular that the ending was a strong move and put everything that happened up until that point in a different light. The narrator is not an easy person to root for, whether it's narcissism or just academic self-absorption (and really the book raises the question if there is really any difference.) His poor wife.

I did feel reluctant to return to this one. I loved White Tears but I think in that novel I was more in sync with the focus of the ideas behind the story, whereas in this one I was less so. And how many books must I read in a row where the author manufactures a few characters and a plot in order to explore ideas? Is this a phase fiction is going through right now? I am resistant even if Kunzru does this with more mastery than most.

This is on the Tournament of Books long list although I would have read it regardless. But Kunzru explores some of the dank dark corners that I'm not happy to know about, and now that I do I can never unlearn them. He forces the reader to join him and I'm not sure I consent to it, but it's too late.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published 03/09/2020

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes: Morpheus to Neo – The Matrix

This is my fourth Hari Kunzru novel (I have read three of his previous five novels – “The Impressionist”, “Transmission” and “White Tears” – I also attended his V&A exhibition around which the novella “Memory Palace” was published.

He is a visionary novelist full of a myriad of thought-provoking ideas (particularly around technology and its interaction with the future of humanity) who sees and explores common links between disparate themes typically does not manage to entirely successfully coalesce them into a fully coherent novel.

This, his latest novel, is firmly in that tradition (and I would say a return to his earlier novels, particularly “Transmission”).

It is perhaps best described as:

German Romanticism (and its various offshoots – not all of which I feel I fully understood)
Meets
The Matrix (the famous quote with which I open my novel provides not just the title but the underpinning for the novel)
To explore the world of privacy/surveillance, the Technological Singularity and the Alt-Right.

The first party narrator of the book is a financially unsuccessful writer (unlike of course the author with his famous £1.5 million advance for his debut novel) suffering a (I think deliberately) cliched mid-life crisis. In a way designed to forfeit any sympathy from the reader, he takes up a residency at a fictional German Institute – the Deuter Centre, hoping to get the time and space to find himself only to find his aims clashing not just with the principles of openness and transparency of work but with a boorish fellow resident, a neuro-scientist who delights in erecting and then demolishing straw men of what he sees as the simplistic views of the arts-residents.

The first part of the book starts as a little bit of a condensed tick-box history of post-war Germany

Deuter was a ex Wehrmacht officer turned respectable Christian Democrat turned famed industrialist, manufacture of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titaniu...
as part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtsch... - quite literally in his case helping to whitewash German industry’s Nazi past. If we needed any reminder of that then the conference centre is located in the Wannsee district of Berlin and the narrator even visits the site of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee.... We have a mention of an assassination attempt on Deuter by the RAF. The centre’s principle “Research into the future development of a transparent public sphere” is of course “all one word in German”. Just when this is all getting a little much – the narrator’s wife agrees with us : “You’re talking about the Nazis. I’m going to put the phone down”.

The other theme running through this opening section is German romanticism.

The narrator’s ostensible aim on the residence is to explore the “construction of the self in lyric poetry” and he is drawn to the (real-life) Wannsee grave of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinric....

Rather amusingly (at least to me) the narrator links von Kleist and his suicide with more modern-day Alt-Right trends:

One day I was staring at the inscription on the marker, which now read unpleasantly to me, like a phrase from the manifesto of an angry young man on his way to murder people at a Walmart. Now, O immortality, you are all mine!

Most commentators seemed to believe that he was what now would be termed an incel.

And this starts to become a more important theme in the novel.

Unwilling to work or eat in the common/public spaces, the narrator takes to binge-watching a US crime series “Blue Lives”, a mix of brutality between corrupt police and criminal gangs, interleaved with occasional philosophical quotes. And that brings us to our first reference to my opening quote, as well as another link to the counter-enlightenment movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_...)

I spent an hour or so on the internet, falling down various rabbit holes, before I finally hit on one of the things I was looking for, the source of the strange words Carson had spoken as he tortured his victim on Blue Lives. As I suspected, they were a quotation, but they didn’t come from some well-known “great book,” but a peculiar and recondite writer, Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre. Insofar as he is remembered at all, Maistre is usually thought of as a footnote to the intellectual history of the eighteenth century, a rigid medieval mind shocked to find itself in the Age of Reason.

We then have a brief interlude when the narrator befriends his cleaner – and on hearing of his concerns about the surveillance he thinks the centre is placing him under (a combination of his unease with the very aims of the foundation and his growing paranoia) spontaneously confesses at length to her past as a Stasi agent (after gaslight style coercion from a handler). This is rather an odd section but does link both to the privacy/surveillance theme of much of the book and to the relationship that the narrator falls into in the second half of the novel.

After another odd incident when the narrator believes he is befriending an asylum seeker and his daughter (only to be suspected as a human trafficker) he meets the person he has become obsessed with Anton – the creator and writer of “Blue Lives”, and following him into a Turkish restaurant, he is challenged Matrix style (albeit Anton is more of a Mr Smith than an Orpheus)

Come inside or stay in the dark. As if he were about to initiate me into a mystery, offer me the red pill.

And from there on is

living and moving in a matrix entirely designed by him ….. The secret was that all our ends and purposes were meaningless, that the truth of existence lay in a sort of ceaseless impersonal violence, merciless and without affect of any kind. This violence was not tragic or heroic or awful of arousing of just or unjust. It simply was.

A red-pill matrix in which he becomes increasingly aware of and obsessed with the dark world of:

Alt-Right, Nordic and White supremacy, Ultima Thule, Celtic crosses, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_..., Siege of Vienna (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_R...) and its symbolism for the defence of White Europe against the Islamic threat, as well as kind of elitist transhumanism

After what is seen by others as a mental breakdown he returns to his wife, but initially the “real” world he returns to is a Matrix construct

Then, at a stroke, the artificiality of what I was seeing revealed itself to me. The streetscape wasn’t real. The sidewalk, the passers-by, the cars, the clouds in the sky, all were elements in a giant simulation. The sunlight was not sunlight but code, the visual output of staggeringly complex calculations.

After being initially wary of his return, his wife eventually welcomes him back into his own bed – and symbolically I think (referring to the opening quote), he quickly re-enters not just a Blue Pill world, but (my phrase) a Blue Political World as well – as his wife and her friends, still oblivious to what he sees as the danger sweeping towards them, hold a party to celebrate Hilary Clinton’s election, a party which of course turns into both a wake and an awakening into a very different realism.

However, this thought-provoking book ends on a note of hope, at the end, as again the narrator wakes in his own bed, but this time with a view that the world of mutuality and ties is actually the more genuine (in all senses) world than the nihilistic (if futuristic) world-view of Anton

What Anton and his capering friends in their red hats call realism—the truth that they think they understand—is just the cynical operation of power. It is not quite a year since I arrived in Berlin, and once again I’m lying awake in my bed. This time Rei is awake beside me. Two rectangles of light. It’s not much, but I can say that the most precious part of me isn’t my individuality, my luxurious personhood, but the web of reciprocity in which I live my life.

Overall a classic Kunzru.

My thanks to Simon and Schuster UK for an ARC via NetGalley.

[Sam Quixote · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hari Kunzru is one of those names I’ve repeatedly come across when browsing bookshelves over the years but I’ve never read one of his books before. So when I saw Red Pill, which sounded topical and potentially interesting in a transgressive/satirical way, I decided to finally find out if this was a writer for me. And - nope!

The premise of Red Pill is a middle-aged academic accepts an invitation to go to an all-expenses-paid three-month artistic retreat in Berlin in an attempt to sort out his writer’s block. What the book is about is another thing entirely and I’m not convinced Kunzru even knows! The novel is such a mess of seemingly-disconnected tangents.

Shortly after arriving, the narrator becomes fixated on Heinrich von Kleist (the chap on the cover with the Superman laser eyes), an obscure German Romantic poet who committed suicide, with his friend’s wife, on the banks of the Wannsee, near to the retreat a couple centuries ago. That leads into a tangent about one of the retreat’s cleaners and her youth as a punk rocker in East Germany and subsequent experience with the Stasi.

Then our narrator becomes obsessed with a fictional gritty crime show called Blue Lives and conveniently happens across the show’s creator at a random party he goes to. This creator then, incongruously, decides to become the narrator’s cartoonishly evil nemesis, leading to the narrator’s full mental breakdown. The book ends anticlimactically and underwhelmingly with the conclusion of the 2016 election.

Oh… k?

I really don’t know what to make of it all. I guess the premise and parts of the first act were mildly compelling. I enjoyed finding out about Kleist and I thought Kunzru would explore the tantalising mystery of why the institute was spying on its guests, but he doesn’t. Other than that, I was mostly bored with what I was reading. The maid’s Stasi past was dull, the way all these divergent narratives came together was sloppy and contrived, and the entire characterisation of Anton, the Blue Lives creator, was bafflingly silly from start to finish. Why would this total stranger decide to go out of their way to destroy another total stranger’s life on a whim for no reason other than a passing disagreement over politics? It made no sense. Anton leads a busy life - who is this unknown academic to him??

I mean, really, what was the point - right wing = wrong wing, or something equally trite? Or the ultra-sensitive narrator was simply plain nuts and got pushed over the edge by awful aspects of our modern world? That’s unimpressive. Ironically, and probably intentionally, the criticism the narrator levels at Anton about his view of the world being full of nihilism and pessimism is reflected in this novel/the narrator’s life - which means the Forces of Darkness won in the end or something gloomy…?

No idea what Hari Kunzru was driving at in this very muddled novel but whatever it was wasn’t entertaining or thoughtful. If this is what the red pill does, take the blue pill instead and don’t head down this dead-end path!

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who has seen the Matrix remembers the meaning of the “red pill” (v. the blue pill). Give it a wider berth and the symbolism will rear its head in Kunzru’s bleak and electrifying thriller-like domestic drama-esque, Kafka-esque new novel. The protagonist and narrator of Pill is a struggling, blocked writer determined to pen a book about the self, in all its high-brow, philosophical, historical, allusion-filled and allegorical connotations. He, the Brooklyn writer, aware of his mid-life funk, appears to have a loving relationship with his wife and daughter, but he is no longer certain if that is true—what is the criteria?---or about his sense of reality or utility.

The narrator accepts a writing fellowship near Berlin for a three-month stint, where most of the action takes place. But it also furnishes solid, revealing dialogue with his wife, Rei, in back story and current phone calls home. Unfortunately, is also where plans for the Final Solution took place during the Holocaust. Herr Deuter, the industrialist who started this “Deuter Center for Social and Cultural Research,” in the late 1970s, expressed his belief that “the royal road to the future lay in confronting the darkness of the past.” What follows is a strange, mind-bending tale about the self and reality that takes our increasingly damaged narrator on a stark journey of revelation and paranoia.

Instead of an independent residency, the protagonist learns (condescendingly) from the current director that his activities are closely monitored, and there are petty policies like where he can work: only at the public Workspace, intensifying his discomfort with these illogical rules (that’s the Kafka-esque point of entry). He stops writing, and begins taking long walks around the perimeter of the center, and watching a mainstream, uninspiring cop show on TV. Uninspiring but chilling, too.

Nothing can be assessed at face value at the Deuter Center. On his walks, the narrator frequently passes the grave of the writer Heinrich von Kleist, a hysteric and writer of chaotic, fragmented stories. Kleist died in a suicide pact with an acquaintance, a woman immaterial in his life. As the walks become regular, the grave’s presence begins to steadily disturb and alarm Kunzru’s protagonist.

The largely conventional police show the narrator obsesses over is Blue Lives, which showcases cops who have lost their moral compass and become criminals themselves; they torture their victims. However, on this typically low-brow and brutish show, our narrator discovers that one of the cops quotes a well-known but vile and dogmatic figure of the past, Joseph de Maistre. Maistre was a late eighteenth century philosopher who was anti-Enlightenment, a supporter of authoritarian rule by Kings and Popes that he believed were divined by God. He was like a dark figure straight out of the Middle Ages, a theocrat and furious autocrat. Subsequently, Kunzru’s narrator meets the creator of the show, an alt-right racist named Anton. The Brooklyn writer’s piercing curiosity with Blue Lives turns to Anton, as Anton represents everything that is sinister and dark, and hurls our narrator toward a psychic battle with the wicked. He wants Anton to explain his appalling ethos.

Kunzru’s prose is limber and immersive, and kept me close to the story even when I thought I lost the plot and misplaced the premise. The more dire our narrator’s mood, the more mired in the murky past and his fear of the future, the more amorphous the storyline was to me. However, if you think the tale is a tangle of ambiguous, inexact implications, don’t worry. Kunzru’s novel has a rewarding payoff where the loose threads tighten up and clarify where and what and why. In fact, the moment of clarity is akin to an organic epiphany, and a warning. If the past is prologue, when is the future epilogue?

The author’s key construct is almost too orderly. He quite leans over into a formula of his own artful making (almost occult), but the way he gets away with it is impressive! His position on humanity is benevolent and kind to the earth and the people who populate it. It seems certain that Kunzru felt a moral imperative and expressed it through art. I am the perfect recipient and I believe that history—100 or 1000 years from now—will agree with me, with us, the victors.

Thank you to Knopf for an ARE via Net Galley

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paranoid and brooding British-Indian writer’s block writer and unreliable narrator who believes he's being monitored by hidden surveillance cameras goes on dreary winter walks and has a midlife crisis staying in a villa on the same lake in Berlin where German poet Heinrich von Kleist topped himself in November 1811 and where the Nazis held the Final Solution Wannsee Conference in 1942, then gets mind-fucked by an alt-right nihilistic TV producer with a 1930's undercut, becomes obsessed with far-right content and conspiracy theorists on the internet, tracks him to Paris then stalks him on an island off the coast of Scotland and ends up having a mental breakdown, before returning to New York to rekindle his relationship with wife & child and eventually celebrate Hillary Clinton being elected to The White House, but watches in horror as a Trump presidency takes hold and kicks him in the guts instead. There is an interesting story within the main narrative about halfway through, as the narrator listens to a maid and former punk rocker tell of her experiences in East Berlin and the effect Stasi persecution had on her life, which works really well in conjunction to his own growing fears and distrust. I loved Red Pill more when it was settled in Berlin - about two-thirds of it, before it drastically changed course and felt like it wanted to start flirting with the apparatus of a thriller. Still, I found this a chilling and highly fascinating work overall, my third by Kunzru, that explores themes like cyberculture, immigration, and the white supremacist worldview. Feels very much right at home with its feet up on the table in this day and age.

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

If someone had pitched this book to me and it wasn't an author I already knew I would have said, "No thanks, not for me." But for Hari Kunzru, I was willing to give it a try. From the title I expected it to be more straightforward, which is hilarious because I have read Kunzru before and I should know better.

The problem is, that when I try to describe the book, there are just more and more things that make it sound like a Nope instead of a Tell Me More. So this is my best pitch: this is, to me, a social horror novel about masculinity. It isn't about a Men's Rights Activist or one of the other subtypes of horrible men on the internet, this book is about a man a lot like Kunzru himself, the biggest difference at first glance is that our unnamed narrator writes nonfiction cultural commentary rather than fiction. He has a wife and a child and is happy with his family and their comfortable life in Brooklyn. Except maybe he's not. His writing has stalled and he takes a fellowship in the hopes that he can get unstuck with just some solitude.

Of course this is a misguided quest, but our narrator, despite putting his best foot forward early on, already shows cracks if you are willing to look for them. I found myself highlighting occasional phrases, small little pieces here and there that left breadcrumbs showing you that this man is not as good as the picture he presents, in a way that is not unfamiliar to anyone that's not a cis man who's spent a lot of time with cis men. His arrival at this German fellowship is the beginning of a kind of descent that isn't unusual in horror novels. (In a way, it reminds me of the beginning of the film MOTHER!, you know, before it gets bad, where nothing overtly awful is happening but somehow it all provokes this deep anxiety.) The thing is, that this anxiety doesn't fully transfer to the reader, which I suspect is Kunzru's intent. The deeper our protagonist falls into his isolation, confusion, and paranoia, the more we see how far away from reality he's getting. So while structurally it has a lot in common with the is-this-real-or-am-I-losing-my-mind subgenre of horror (a problematic one, much of the time, given what it says about mental health) here it is quite clear that our narrator is moving into a delusion that is becoming more and more obviously harmful to him and others.

This is a slow burn, the beginning doesn't lay on the dread too thick, if you're like me you'll find our narrator more and more frustrating because it would be so easy to just not be the worst and yet he keeps choosing to be the worst and to sabotage himself and others. Because of who our narrator is there are lots of diversions here that some readers will probably delight in, with lots of academics and dead philosophers. It doesn't do much for me, but I found it interesting how you don't have to be that specific kind of man we think of when you consider toxic masculinity. The way our narrator can find these things in poetry and philosophy, along with popular television shows, which makes a lot of sense because in a culture utterly steeped in masculinity, where can you go that you won't find it?

If you found WHITE TEARS a bit too surreal and supernatural, there is less of that here, though structurally and thematically they have similarities. A few things where you wonder if something really happened, but mostly it's clear to the reader that the mental health of our narrator is swiftly deteriorating. It's no mistake that the real movement starts about halfway through, after he listens to the story of a woman who was forced to work for the secret police in East Germany, that he really begins to start seeing enemies everywhere. Ironically, his primary enemy is the exact kind of man we'd expect this kind of book to be about, one full of bravado, casually racist, and obsessed with violence constantly spouting nihilism. Even seeing himself as a polar opposite to such a man, he still manages to embody many of the same characteristics, a narcissism and emotional immaturity that defies politics or social status.

I think this book pairs nicely with another literary horror of the season, LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam. While they have very different approaches, the families at their center are quite similar in class, politics, and status. Both books also have this slow descent into a kind of apocalyptic fear. And both present Trump's America itself as the apocalypse, a metaphorical monster. Which certainly has a new resonance right now.

[Trudie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

This cover pretty much matched the experience of reading this. Disturbing. (Those red laser beam eyes keep looking at me as I write this)

Red Pill was a perplexing and uncomfortable read. Certainly not the best novel to pick up before an election nor if you're given to worry about the upswing of the Alt. Right or constant surveillance.
It was a little too esoteric and scattered for me and I certainly didn’t love it as much as White Tears.
It is tapping into a kind of 2016-2020 brand of anxiety which I find I don’t need in a novel just now but maybe from the safety of the future it might be a worthwhile novel to revisit?

(After discussing this with my book club and thinking about it on and off over recent weeks, I have come to appreciate it more and have bumped my rating up to 3.5. However, I still maintain the experience of reading this was less pleasant than I had hoped for )

[Dax · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the smarter novels I've read in some time. Kunzru tackles several powerful themes, particularly the growing sense of paranoia and dread that so many are feeling today. Our protagonist identifies several components that ultimately lead to his breakdown; the complexity of the world and our individual insignificance as role players, the role of fear in society, a loss of our individual depth due to overexposure, loss of privacy, and lastly, a growing sense of isolation. It makes for heavy reading but I found much to gleam from it.

I've seen a few complaints about the seemingly random insertion of Monika's back story, but that diversion actually serves as a springboard for our protagonist. Hearing about the surveillance culture Monika grew up in allows him to make the final leap into full paranoia. If it was real once upon a time, there is no reason it cannot be real once again.

I also appreciated Kunzru's questioning of the status quo. We have been told so many times what the status quo is that we no longer question what is acceptable and what is not. In a passage concerning his work with therapists and psychoanalysts, the protagonist says this, "Their work was predicated on the assumption that the world is bearable, and anyone who finds it otherwise should be coaxed or medicated into acceptance. But what if it isn't? What if the reasonable reaction is endless horrified screaming?"

Again, this all sounds very dark and depressing, and it is. But Kunzru does suggest an antidote for us. Something that can rescue us from our anxieties. Togetherness. To understand and appreciate the importance of reciprocity with one another. He concludes, "Alone, we are food for the wolves. That's how they want us. Isolated. Prey. So we must find each other. We must remember that we do not exist alone."

It's a weird story, but it's a powerful one too. Even if the plot is too strange for your taste, by the conclusion of the novel you will appreciate the books' qualities. High four stars, and I wouldn't be surprised if I go up to five as I digest it further.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not much, but I can say that the most precious part of me isn't my individuality, my luxurious personhood, but the web of reciprocity in which I live my life... Alone, we are food for the wolves. That's how they want us. Isolated. Prey. So we must find each other. We must remember that we do not exist alone.

This is a weird but somehow wonderful confection of ideas that brings together a collage made up of Heinrich von Kleist, the lyric 'I', the decision about the Nazi's Final Solution, the old East Berlin, the Matrix, a TV show that sounds like The Shield, paranoia (or is it?) and the re-emergence of alt-right politics that culminate in the 2016 US election. Somehow Kunzru - just about - makes it hold together though, I'd have to say, a touch more coherence would have been preferable for me.

What unifies it all is the voice of the narrator whose struggles with personal freedom, and subjectivity as literary form lead him in strange directions. Throughout, this book manages to be beguilingly intelligent and also just a bit bonkers - but in a good way! I certainly felt that a closer acquaintance with German literature and thought might have served me well as some of the references, I fear, were not picked up by me.

All the same, this is clever but has heart - definitely a book for our times.

Many thanks to Simon and Schuster/Scribner UK for an ARC via NetGalley.

[Jerrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated how the author took the current ‘red pill’ narrative and flipped it on its head here. The people claiming to really know what’s going on are actually the ones being manipulated by certain forces with aims of political and cultural change (which actually is what’s happening, but you can’t convince them of that). The unnamed narrator only seems to be able to see this after a lot of bizarre behaviors on his part. A lot of the current situations and buzzwords are thrown about here in a tongue-in-cheek way, but ultimately this book was a bit like a puzzle where all the parts don’t quite fit together properly and there were a lot of blind leaps that were hard to believe. 3.5⭐️

[Gorkem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Giriş:
Kırmızı Hap’ı bir müzikle anlatacak olsam sanırım Ahmet Adnan Saygun’un Eski Üslupta Kantat Op:19’un özellikle ilk bölümü(02:44'ye kadar) en güzel bütünleşecek eser olurdu. A.A Saygun her ne kadar bu koral eserini Kurtuluş Savaşımızın öncesi ve sonrasını düşünerek yazıp bestelemiş olsa da , Kırmızı Hap’ı okurken defalarca beynimde çalıp durdu. Kitabı ilk açtığınızda orta yaş krizine giren isimsiz anlatıcımızın yaşayacaklarını Hari Kunzru bizlere aynen bu hislerle hissettiriyor.

Kırmızı Hap, ismini Matrix’deki Morpheus’un Neo’ya sunduğu meşhur hap sahnesinden alıyor. Kırmızı Hap’ın filmin yayınlanmasından sonra, sosyolojik bir hareket haline dönüşmesi ve zamanla disiplinlerarası çalışmaları açıklayan bir sistematik düşünceler bütünü temsil etmeye başladı. Hari Kunzru bu bütünlük karşısında bizleri müthiş sürükleyici, rahatsız edici bir anti-kahramanı hem günümüz tarihi açısından hem de birazcık kişinin kendi dünyası açısından distopik dokunuşlar eşliğinde okumaya davet ediyor.

Konu: Tarihin İzleri

Kırmızı Hap, orta yaş krizine girmiş bir isimsiz evli bir yazarın Almanya’da Wannsee’deprestijli bir enstitüye kafasını toparlamak gitmesiye başlıyor ve bu gidişin kendi hayatı açısında mazeretlerle dolu katastrofik bir çıkmaza gidişini kriz kavramının ana başlığında 4 farklı bölüm halinde okuyoruz.
( Wannsee, Zersetzung ( Çözülme), Bir Kıyamet ve Ev).

Kitabın ilk bölümü nerdeyse bir entellektüelin kara mizahı izlenimi veriyor. Fakat alt metinde ilk bölümde ciddi olarak seçilen mekanın, metaforların, diyaloglar arası tedirginliği, anlatıcımızın araştırma konusununa bağlı olarak gelişen metafizik rastlantıların (lirik şiir aracığıyla benlik kavramının ifadesi) izini okuyoruz. Yazarımız, kişisel gizlilik ve ortak çalışma alanı içinde çalışamaması üzerine kendisine sürekli mazaretler üretmesi bize bir nevi entellektüel komedisi etkisi veriyor.

Kitabın diğer bölümleri içinde 2.bölüm ilk bölümden sonra okuyucuyu son derece bambaşka bir yere taşıyarak soğuk savaş sonrası Doğu Almanyası’na ve stasilere doğru yolculuğa çıkarıyor.

Sonuç:

Kırmız Hap benim bir pazar akşamı elime öylesine alıp elimden bırakamadığım ve okurken bazı yerlerde çok fazla sinirlendiğim ve merakla, tedirginlik içinde okuduğum müthiş bir okumaydı. Özellikle, ilk bölümde entellektüel ve yaratıcı sektörler içinde iş yapan kişilerin fazlasıyla karşısına çıkan sistem insanlarının, düşünme ve yorumlama güçleri zayıf olan fakat her zaman yaratım sürecini baltalayan kişilerin kitabın diğer bölümlerinde de şekillendirilerek ciddi olarak kültürel bir eleştiri sunuyor (marksist eleştiri referansında).

Kitabından birinci bölümünden son bölümüne kadar Aydınlama Çağı ve Avrupa eleştirisini , günümüz insanlarının karşılaştığı sorunların arkeolojik kazınmasını öylesine rastgele oluşturmadığını kitabın sonunda çok net geriyoruz. Kunzru’nun kaos kavramını, bireysel çılgınlığın yansımalarını, birçok perspektif içinde kitabın sonuna kadar harika bir matematikte anlatıyor ve çağdaş Amerikan Edebiyat’ında sıklıkla karşımıza çıkan yer alan entellektüellerin davranışlarına paralel olarak oluşan absürtlükleri diğer çağdaşları gibi ( Ben Lerner, Elif Batuman ve hatta belki Franzen) ustalıkla kullanıyor.

Çeviri ve okunabilirlik açısından İthaki’ye değinmem gerekiyor. İthaki son 1 yıldır inanılmaz derece başarılı işlere imza atıyor ve umarım hep böyle devam eder. Kitabın çevirisi Burcu Denizci tarafından yapılmış ve harika bir iş çıkarmış olsa da akademik referanslara ait olmayan bazı sözcük seçimlerinde kolaya kaçtığını ya da acaba bu sözcük olsaydı diye düşünmeden edinemedim.

Kitapla ilgili getirebileceğim tek olumsuz eleştiri belki de Kunzru’nun felsefe mezunu olmasından kaynaklanan okura bazı kavramları aşırı vermiş bazı okurlar açısından yorucu, zorlama ve kitabın bütünlüğü açısından belki dağınık gelmesine neden olabilir. Benim açımdan da bazı yerlerde fikren bayat bulduğum yerler ve olmasaymış daha iyi olurmuş dediğim bir kaç sayfa olsa da bu fikirler benim için sorun teşkil etmedi ve kitaba olumsuz yansımadı. Kitabın baştan sona kadar bıraktığı arayış hissi, yazarın kademeli olarak yapılandırdığı temalar benim için keyifli ve güzel bir okuma serüveni meydana getirdi. Ek olarak bazı yerlerde Wolfang Hilbing'in Ben kitabını tekrardan hatırlamama neden oldu. Bu durum sadece bu kitabın konusu ve bazı temaların benzerliğinden kaynaklandı

Özetle, Kırmızı Hap müthiş sürükleyici ve bu yıl okuduğum en iyi kitaplar içinde yerini çoktan almış durumda. Hari Kunzru müthiş bir yazar ve anlatıcı . Neyse ki İthaki diğer kitaplarını basacak gibi gözüküyor. Kırmız Hap’tan önceki kitabı White Tears Kıvanç Güney çevirisiyle raflarda 12 Nisan 2023’de yerini aldı. Gölgelerin Gölgesi hala Nadir Kitapta mevcut. Umarım diğer kitapları da basılır.Kitap hakkında söylenebilecek çok fazla detay var ama daha fazla uzatmadan, eğer çağdaş bir entellektüel ve 21.yy eleştirisi okumak istiyorsanız Kırmızı Hap harika bir kitap. Kitabın özellik son bölümü bizlerin de gelecek günlerimiz adına hoş bir tesadüf içeriyor.

Şimdiden merak edip okuyacak herkese iyi okumalar!
10/8

“ Orta yaşın tam olarak ne zaman başladığını kestirmek, bence mümkün. Hayatiniz irdelediğiniz andır o ve açılan olasılık kapılarıyla artan fırsatlardan ziyade çevrenizin yeni yeni bilincinde, uykudan henüz uyanmışsınız ya da karaya vurmuşsunuz gibi bir hisse kapılırsınız. işte buradayım, dersiniz kendi kendinize. Demek bu hâle geldim. Durumunuzun -fiziksel, entelektüel, sosyal, finansal olarak- tamamıyla değişken olmadığını; hâlihazırda yaşanmış şeylerin, hikâyenin geri kalanı büyük ölçüde belirleyeceğini anladığınız ilk andır. Yaptıklarınız geri alınamaz ve "daha sonraya" ertelediğiniz çoğu şey asla gerçekleşmeyecek.”

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unusual novel about obsession, mental health, and the pressures of today’s world. The unnamed protagonist and narrator is a writer living in New York City with his wife and three-year-old child. He accepts a fellowship in Wannsee, Berlin to work on his new book about poetry. He does not realize the offer requires him to interact with the other attendees and write in a shared space. He does not feel comfortable working while “being watched.”

This rather benign scenario rapidly devolves into a deeper paranoia of being watched in his hotel room, which is further inflamed by an encounter with a former East German woman who had been intimidated by the Stasi, and an obsession with a member of the alt-right, who he believes is controlling his thoughts. He does not feel safe in the world and worries he cannot protect his family. He begins to question reality.

There are a number of philosophical overtones and discussions. It is a warning about the return of fascism. Hari Kunzru is a masterful writer. He includes a number of metafictional elements and literary references. It will not be to everyone’s taste as it definitely goes into esoteric territory, but I enjoyed reading this creative exploration of ideas from a unique perspective.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hari Kunzru’s tour de force is about a lot of things, but at the end of the day, it is about accepting unpleasant truth or blissful ignorance and determining whether the truth you think you understand is nothing more than a cynical operation of power.

To get to that point, you—the reader—will need to go through a maze, embedded in the mind of a mentally unstable narrator. This journey, for those of us who are not steeped in certain German intellectual philosophies may make us begin to feel lost along the way. Never fear, Mr. Kunzru ties it all together in a way that becomes more accessible.

The plot focuses on a Brooklyn writer undergoing an early mid-life crisis who accepts a paid-for residency at the fictional Deuter Centre off of Berlin’s Lake Wannsee—not coincidentally, the place where the Nazi Final Solution was cooked up. Deuter himself is an ex-Wehrmacht officer turned industrialist who is committed to whitewashing the Nazi past. To our narrator’s dismay, he discovers that the institute is all about transparency and openness, which runs directly contrary to his own beliefs about privacy.

As his mind unravels, the narrator becomes obsessed with Heinrich von Heist, a late eighteenth century German dramatist and lyricist who tended to irrationalism and restlessness and was tormented for a longing for death. That obsession becomes transplanted by binge-watching of a U.S. crime series called “Blue Lives” – filled with violence and brutality and interspersed with occasional philosophical thoughts by Comte de Maistre, a little known rigid medieval mind shocked to find itself in the Age of Reason. The obsession extends to Anton, the creator of the series and his sometimes nihilistic, sometimes Darwinian beliefs.

I freely admit that there are several connections as the plot moves forward and there is a good chance that some of them soared over my head. At times, I would have liked to see more coherence. Having said that, I am not sure that an absolute understanding of all of it is completely necessary to appreciate and understand what Kunzru is trying to accomplish.

Is normality “a paper screen over something bloody and atavistic that is rising up out of history to meet us?” Or is it the ability to remain at a certain remove from the alt right culture and our dark past the key to keeping oneself sane? The answers will come together forcibly with a nod to our present times. Don’t expect an easy read. But do expect a rewarding one. A big thanks to Knopf Publishing and NetGalley for an advance ARE.

[Joachim Stoop · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best novel I've read this year.
I'm pretty sure this is one of the best novels published in 2020.
Try to dive in tabula rasa.

5 stars

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hari Kunzru's latest novel is proof that even very intelligent writers can sometimes go off the rails. From the start it held great promise and I was anticipating an invigorating, wild ride. Like dud pyrotechnics, however, the initial sonic boom led only to an underwhelming fizzle. The spectacle I hoped for never arrived.

For all its literary aspirations and philosophical allusions, Red Pill is a stylistic hash; a bold attempt at wrestling with modern anxieties that frequently loses its grip. It's mostly clear what the author was trying to accomplish, but this patched-together affair fails to sustain most of the momentum it generates along the way. The saccharine finale did nothing to improve matters.

2.5 stars

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Red Pill is the second of Kunzru’s books I’ve read; White Tears was my first. And it is becoming a pattern in that I find it hard to assess and evaluate the novel and my reading experience after I finish Kunzru’s work, and also that my evaluation changes over time. I started writing this review mildly ambivalent about the book, enjoying its cleverness and meditations but feeling flat emotionally and left with a need for greater coherence and climactic payoff, but as I worked through my thoughts, my understanding and appreciation deepened for Kunzru’s craft, even of the things I liked less.

The first half of the book for me was a bit less compelling for me and harder to read, but it was entirely necessary and the seeds planted sprout vines that descend throughout the text. We are introduced to the writer narrator, entering the Deuter Center for the writing fellowship facing a professional and existential crisis. The narrator is highly self-aware, and being in his head we vacillate between his selfishness, ego, insecurity, hunger for freedom, a heady mix that interacts with his depression and writer’s block. There are some interesting asides and anecdotes – the trip down memory lane into East Berlin and controlled life under Stasi was FASCINATING – but I could get wearied by some of the immersion into German literature and philosophy, although some of that was simply because I was less familiar with the references and it could break my focus to try and outside the text understand what was being referenced. One thing that I give enormous credit to Kunzru for in the first half is being able to slyly and obliquely plant thematic seeds in the first half that sprout in predictable yet still interesting ways in the back half. "Red Pill" as a title itself is spoiler to a degree, with all the modern, alt-right baggage that comes from the term and not simply meaning the ticket to freedom from its source The Matrix, but I appreciated that we could draw the lines from Kleist to Anton and the web woven round the narrator ourselves: Kunzru lays them out but deploys them softly rather than bluntly.

The second half of the book starts by building on the groundwork of the plot and characters, and wrestles with concepts of masculinity and what it means to be a man, what space there is for men to experience depression, what men are or are not “allowed” to be, and and opens wider to some of the alt-right themes, although the way these ideas are dealt with could be a mixed bag at times. For example, there’s a recurring presence of a refugee father and his young daughter, who are held up as a foil to the narrator away at the Center and his own daughter at home. The narrator seems to focus on his failure to protect his daughter, and those feelings are magnified by watching Blue Lives, the aggressive cop show putting everyone in harm’s way and allowing horrendous violence and revenge to be taken by criminals and cops alike. Blue Lives is a fascinating device in and of itself – the cops are crooked and unsympathetic, yet have a code in which their violence is seemingly only exhibited on criminals and those involved in the underworld, while the brown criminals seem to be targeting civilians/women and children, though for the narrator it isn’t shown, just alarmingly and threateningly teased. Kunzru uses this as way to lead the narrator into Anton’s ideology and allow for being redpilled, that in this soft, modern world men have removed themselves from the primal and basic roles as protector and survivor for themselves and their families, and that in and of itself causes confusion and some form of illness that can be cured. And while the narrator rejects that in his head, it’s harder for him to refute in speech and the ideas (and Anton) takes some hold of him emotionally. But the father and daughter foil are less fleshed out than Blue Lives is for the narrator: these are simply brown, desperate foils with no ability to speak for themselves or in a larger way challenge the narrator’s assumptions, and I think that might have helped me appreciate the comparison AND perhaps on the plot side added to the unmooring of the narrator and demonstrate his further loosening hold on reality.

Now, I know “comparison is the thief of joy” and all that, but I picked up Red Pill because I had had such an unsettling and memorable experience reading White Tears , and I was interested to see how another novel of his would work for me. I won’t get into explicit spoilers, although I think it’s somewhat less imperative in this case as there is seemingly less to spoil in the traditional sense. But Kunzru’s books, to keep things timely as Kunzru does, are in my view epitomized by the popular meme "they had us in the first half, I'm not gonna lie". There’s a divide for readers of White Tears as to whether the back half or third of the book makes or breaks the work, and I at least can see a similar thing happening for readers of Red Pill . For me at least, the second half is where Kunzru shows me WHY I am reading this book. This is where most of the grappling with his larger themes happen, where all the table setting of mildly boring details from the first half are woven in and pay off in dramatic and fantastical fashion, where Kunzru builds to a climax of ideas and action… except that doesn’t exactly happen in Red Pill . Or does it? The buildup is there and the mood is feverish and unsettling and thoughts are roaring through the narrator’s head and I read these pages in a similar fashion, but there’s not the same knockout punch at the end. Instead of the crescendo crashing over me, reading the end was more like a balloon being deflated. There was a letdown, a missed opportunity… and yet the more I think about it, the more I feel the deliberateness of Kunzru’s ending. That deflated balloon sound embodies the narrator’s disappointment in himself, his position in his new/old reality and how people are interacting with him. We go from the manic paranoia high of action and confrontation:

The Apocalypse is the time when all secrets are revealed. By scrambling down towards the cliffs, I knew I was only postponing the moment when the bones of the dead would start up from the earth and I would be turned inside out like the victim of a medieval execution, my innards unspooled and put on display for the crowd. Privacy is the exclusive property of the gods. They see us, but we can never see them. We live like spies, always braced for exposure, while they remain a mystery. The sky was a helmet constricting my head; sweat dripped down my face.

To:

As I stand here at the kitchen counter and set out food for the party, I try to fill a bowl with olives normally. I try to open a package of crackers normally, to arrange a cheeseboard in the way a normal person should arrange a cheeseboard, without excessive precision or showiness, presenting the cheese according to some ordinary aesthetic standard, with the right level of care, neither too much nor too little, unwrapping the cheeses – a wheel of Brie, a wedge of Manchego, one of those expensive little goat cheeses that come wrapped in a vine leaf – just as a normal host would, someone for whom the meaning of these actions could never be in question.

Despite the abrupt shift in tone, content, and pace, this passage really struck me and stayed with me, as it seemed to illustrate how the narrator finds even the most minute of tasks to be fraught with meaning and filled with traps that might show how not “normal” he is or is perceived to be. The scaring of people who love you, the fear and insecurity that then lurks in every interaction no matter how small, it’s a difficult space to occupy but even harder to get past or move on from. The emotional highs mirror the narrator’s own internal state, the ending is a letdown of sorts because that is where the narrator is and must be to function in the life he’s created for himself and wants. There’s a disturbing implication in there too, an unsaid question as to whether or not the redpill life isn’t in some way more free, more open, more amenable to emotion and interpretation and imagination. At one point, Kunzru takes the language of The Matrix and makes it even more present: the narrator explicitly thinks being home in New York to a technological construct (much like the bluepill world humans inhabit in the movie), which seems to compare negatively to the raw, lonely, “real” existence the narrator had on the island. And I think Kunzru’s intended or likely audience is able to of course reject that notion as the narrator does, but maybe push towards a less automatic and more examined idea of our choices, beliefs and the systems we subscribe to.

While I didn’t love the placement in the timeline of the ending – the election of Donald Trump and liberal fear and disappointment in the nation’s rejection of Hillary Clinton, a bit too on the nose if highly relevant to the topic - Kunzru ends on a note of both optimism and darkness, the narrator asserting his place in the world and his beliefs, while also acknowledging the fear and the danger presented. It's not much, but I can say that the most precious part of me isn't my individuality, my luxurious personhood, but the web of reciprocity in which I live my life.... Alone, we are food for the wolves. That's how they want us. Isolated. Prey. So we must find each other. We must remember that we do not exist alone.. For me, this book while not packing the wallop of White Tears , I couldn’t help but be impressed by Kunzru’s craft and was ultimately engaged and unsettled for days after. While I also was ambivalent about my feelings for this book, I think I will land on 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 stars: this is a flawed book that I by turns found irritating and unsatisfying in parts, but Kunzru’s ability to tie it all together and keep me thinking about what I read speaks to its power.

[Fanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

August 30, 2020: A bitter pill you can yet cannot swallow—utter chaos from an unnamed narrator's existential crisis that blows into paranoia around not just oneself but also the understandable fear of inequalities, suffering, and a resurgence of the far-right, to the intoxicating complex narrative that points to poetic romanticism of the nineteenth century, harsh history, and political philosophy, thereby opening up doors to discussions on seemingly linear yet realistically convoluted and intricate themes.

The strained apprehension of watching someone unfurl into a disturbed state and witnessing the questionable realisations of simulation, conspiracies, and existence slowly trickle down each page, makes this novel nothing less than intelligent and nothing more than an expedient read.

March 25, 2020: This one takes into account the current political climate and increasingly polarised world, and I'm all here for it. Thank you, Scribner (Simon & Schuster UK) for the digital review copy via Netgalley!

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

In Hari Kunzru's much anticipated follow-up to White Tears we follow a writer who travels to Berlin to take part in a fellowship which isn't quite what he expected: he's expected to write in a big room with the other participants, where everyone can see exactly what (or how little) he's doing. Our unnamed protagonist rebels, and the novel spirals out in various directions from here - to include the Nazis, 9/11 and police dramas, among other themes.

While I appreciate the wider themes and message Kunzru is portraying through this novel - the blurb on Goodreads describes this as "searching for order in a world that frames madness as truth" - I didn't always get along with the way he decides to convey them. The unnamed narrator is overly self-involved bordering on navel-gazing at times, which, yes, might have been the point... but it makes for frustrating reading. The different sections didn't really tie together, and left me scratching my head as to how they related to one another. The middle section where the narrator meets the writer of the cop show he becomes obsessed with was drawn out and the following section was genuinely bizarre.

I'm sure many readers will love this: Red Pill is a puzzle of a novel, capturing the zeitgeist of this weird and sketchy time we're living through and the unsettling feeling it provokes in many of us. I guess it hit a bit too close to home for it to make for a satisfying read for me.

Thank you Netgalley and Simon and Schuster UK for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.

[Neil · Rating 3 out of 5]

A writer in New York has a mid-life crisis. His writing is more and more of a struggle and it is affecting his personal relationships. An unexpected chance to take up a residency at the Deuter Center in Berlin seems the perfect way to escape and regain his mojo.

But the residency does not go as planned. Firstly, he can’t settle to his work and begins binge watching a violent TV crime drama, Blue Lives, and he quickly comes to the conclusion that there are hidden messages in the dialogue which makes regular reference to obscure literary works and seems to be promoting a nihilistic outlook on life. Secondly, the Center is in Wannsee and close to the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held (where Reinhard Heydrich proposed his Final Solution to the Jewish Problem) and, although the stated aims of the Deuter Center seem directly opposed to this kind of thinking, our narrator quickly becomes concerned at the level of surveillance and the general set up. Gradually, his level of paranoia ramps up and his mental state deteriorates. When he meets Anton, the driving force behind Blue Lives, at a party, he drops into a world of far right conspiracies and everything unwinds from there.

This is a novel that is packed with ideas. I am confident that there are more ideas in the book than I picked up on. Our narrator (never named) is increasingly unreliable, but his obsession with Heinrich von Kleist drives him and the narrative forward. There are plenty of other references to political philosophy and other figures from the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, and I think it was somewhere in here that my ignorance began to affect my appreciation of the novel.

I think that, in order to appreciate this novel, you perhaps have to be able to make connections at a deeper level than I was able to. Without these deeper connections, it becomes a collection of ideas and storylines that are hard to pull together into a coherent novel. For example, there is a prolonged section telling the story of one the cleaners at the hotel and I cannot see why this needs to take up such a large part of the overall book. And many of the decisions the protagonist makes make very little sense, even taking his deteriorating mental state into account. Maybe when I see this book being reviewed and discussed on its publication, I will be able to appreciate it better. For now, I am prepared to say it’s me not the book, but I couldn’t make it work properly for me at this stage.

My thanks to Simon & Schuster for an ARC via NetGalley.

[Michael Livingston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dreamy, paranoid and riven with anxiety, Kunzru's latest book covers so much ground, but is fundamentally interested in the decline and fall of liberal democracy. It closes with the election of Trump, but feels grimly prescient. It's a weird, bumpy ride - starting out as another insular book about writing before spiralling off to East German punks, alt-right internet forums and a complete paranoid breakdown. It's hard to pin down and stuffed with references and allusions but propulsive and immensely engaging.

[Alexander Carmele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bedenkliche Reise durchs Labyrinth einer Selbstfindung. Ein Anti-Zauberberg.

Inhalt: 4/5 Sterne (Spannungsreiche Episoden)
Form: 2/5 Sterne (tlw. bemühte Standardsprache)
Komposition: 3/5 Sterne (schlechtes Finish - lose verknüpft)
Leseerlebnis: 5/5 Sterne (intensives Ringen ums Wachsein)

Hari Kunzru beschreibt in „Red Pill“ den Versuch einer Selbstfindung. Verstrickt im humanistischen Erbe, hin und her gerissen zwischen Walter Benjamin und Heinrich von Kleist durchlebt der Ich-Erzähler eine Krise mit ungewissem Ausgang. Der Plot ist nebensächlich. Hauptaugenmerk liegt auf den mäandernden Selbstreflexionen um den dünnen Erzählfaden herum, wie es oft in der Literatur der Fall ist, sofern es sich nicht um bspw. einen Liebesroman oder einen Thriller handelt.

„Rilke, der durch seine eigene riesige Einsamkeit wanderte und stundenlang niemanden sah, oder Hölderlin, dessen Wahnsinn würdevoll und kanonisch war, der Goldstandard romantischer Geisteskrankheit. Goethe wäre ideal gewesen. Kleist dagegen war ein Hysteriker, der Verfasser schriller Stücke und fragmentarischer Geschichten voller Hektik, Schlachten, Erdbeben und psychischer Schocks.“

Der Ich-Erzähler ist ein halbwegs erfolgreicher Schriftsteller, der von einer Stiftung ein Stipendium zugesprochen bekommt, um in Abgeschiedenheit, am Wannsee in Berlin-Zehlendorf, sein Buch über das „lyrische Ich“ zu beenden. Die Stiftung namens „Deuter“ besitzt aber eine Philosophie. Die Stipendiaten müssen in einem gemeinsamen Raum arbeiten. Sie leben in einer gläsernen Welt. Alles wird überwacht, kommentiert, alles ist sichtbar. Der Ich-Erzähler gerät in eine Krise, magisch angezogen und abgestoßen von Heinrich von Kleists und Henriette Vogels Selbstmord an selbiger Stelle, fühlt sich eingesperrt, rebelliert, lernt in Berlin eine Ex-Stasi-Spionin kennen, einen grobschlächtigen und größenwahnsinnigen Serienproduzenten, und flieht letztlich über Paris auf eine schottische Insel, wo er von Polizisten in Gewahrsam genommen und letztlich, nach einem kurzen Aufenthalt in einer Psychiatrie, zurück nach New York gebracht wird, wo das Buch mit der US-Präsidentenwahl von 2016 endet.

„Ich hatte an einem gewissen Punkt akzeptiert, dass ich nur auf meine Weise zu kommunizieren verstand, indem ich eine Art parataktischen Sturm undurchsichtiger kultureller Verweise entfachte und meine Leser dazu einlud, zusammen mit mir durch sie hindurchzutaumeln. Das steht nicht gerade weit oben in der Beliebtheitsskala, und wenn ich auch kein Interesse daran habe, um der Unergründlichkeit willen unergründlich zu sein, habe ich doch kein Talent für das Einfache.“

Kunzrus Roman vollzieht eine bedenkliche Gratwanderung zwischen Wahnsinn und Eingebung, zwischen Wachheit und Paranoia, zwischen Angst und Poesie. „Red Pill“ lässt sich als ein Gegenstück zu Thomas Manns „Der Zauberberg“ lesen. Hans Castorp flieht in das Sanatorium, um sich vor der Welt zu verstecken, sucht die Krankheit, um sich nicht exponieren zu müssen, sieht aber am Ende ein, dass ihm nichts übrigbleibt und das Sanatorium, seinen safe place, verlassen muss. In dieser Entwicklung wird viel gesprochen, räsoniert, die üblichen Themen durchdekliniert. So auch bei Kunzru, nur dass hier die Reise weiter in den Zauberberg hineingeht. Am Ende verwebt, verschwebt, verklebt sich alles zu einer riesigen Simulation der Realitätsentrückung.

„Ich ging in einen Lebensmittelmarkt, kaufte in einem italienischen Feinkostladen simulierte Oliven, probierte ein Stück Parmesan, das mir ein simulierter Käseverkäufer anbot, schmeckte Salz und Umami und staunte über die Technologie, Ionen zu simulieren, die durch simulierte Kanäle in die Zellen von Geschmacksrezeptoren wanderten und simulierte Axone anregten, Informationen an irgendeine Art von Datenfeld oder Konnektom weiterzugeben, das mein Gehirn repräsentierte.“

Der Roman ist nichts für leichte Nerven. Viele Ängste werden geschürt. Die Sprache zieht dennoch in ihren Bann. Die Selbstreflektiertheit des Ich-Erzählers lässt Raum zum Atmen. Er bleibt in seiner Hilflosigkeit sympathisch und empathisch. Man exponiert sich gemeinsam mit ihm einer dritten Realität, die des Textes, in welchem die des Computers in Bits and Bytes thematisiert wird. Am Ende weiß man nicht mehr, wo welcher Text aufhört oder beginnt, wo die Tradition einsetzt, die Phrase beginnt, das Zitat endet, wo der Autor sucht, oder sich bereits in seinen Verweisungen und Desillusionen gefunden und verfangen hat. Sicherlich eine Art „Fänger im Roggen“ derjenigen Generation, die noch aufwuchsen ohne Computer und denen der Computer daher nicht vollends geheuer sein kann.

Viel überzeugender ist „Klara und die Sonne“ von Kazuo Ishiguro und „Echos Kammern“ von Iris Haneka. Dennoch weiß „Red Pill“ durchaus zu überzeugen und liest sich schnell, obgleich ein gewisser Schauder, eine Art Unbehagen nach dem Lesen hängen bleibt, den man so schnell nicht mehr abschütteln kann. Kein gutes Buch für zurückgezogene, einsame Lektüre.

Nachtrag von 2021.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Red Pill is an anxious narrative that is about many things, most significantly the decline of the narrator’s mental stability in the face of the increasing compromise of liberal democracy. This is a hectic novel, littered with cultural and literary references. Although it doesn’t always hang together perfectly Kunzru builds tension expertly throughout, especially through the motif of surveillance. Ultimately, this is a book which asks us a lot of questions about the world unfolding around us. Perhaps not the story we want or need, but a story which captures the fractious anxiety of these times.

[Nadine in California · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much to analyze in this book that I'm tongue-tied. Also, I don't want to give any spoilers away, so I'll just give a one-sentence description: Man's life goes awry when he takes his existential crises literally. My Kindle copy has 92 highlights and 17 long notes, so that's a testament to how blown away I was by the writing and the themes.