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Red Pill
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Hari Kunzru
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
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Red Pill
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Publisher's Summary
One of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2020
One of NPR's Best Books of 2020
One of the A.V. Club's 15 Favorite Books of 2020
From the widely acclaimed author of White Tears, a bold new novel about searching for order in a world that frames madness as truth.
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 - and soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all.
Wannsee is a place full of ghosts: 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". When some friends drag him to a party where he meets Anton, the creator of Blue Lives, the narrator begins to believe that the two of them are involved in a cosmic battle and that Anton is "red-pilling" his viewers - turning them toward an ugly, alt-rightish worldview - ultimately forcing the narrator to wonder if he is losing his mind.
What the critics say
"Haunting and timely ... Kunzru is not the first to write about the free-floating dread and creeping paranoia brought on by the accelerated technologies and fluid social structures of modern life, but his innovation lies in having grafted a taut psychological thriller onto an old-fashioned systems novel of the sort Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon used to write. The effect is dizzying, and also delightful, as he riffs on everything from the early-nineteenth-century German writer Heinrich von Kleist to surveillance culture to the Counter-Enlightenment to the history of schnitzel, while somehow still clocking in at under three hundred pages.” (Jenny Offill, The New York Review of Books)
“Razor-sharp ... as an allegory about how well-meaning liberals have been blindsided by pseudo-intellectual bigots with substantial platforms, it’s bleak but compelling ... ‘Kafkaesque’ is an overused term, but it’s an apt one for this dark tale of fear and injustice.” (Kirkus starred)
“Dazzling ... Kunzru has created a complex, challenging, and bold story about a world gone amok..." (Booklist starred)