Red Pill is a frustrating read - at times enthralling and at times just a pseudo intellectual dirge. The central character, a writer, spends a lot of time pondering on his art in the early stages and I nearly gave up about a tenth of the way in. As he becomes more isolated it becomes interesting, but only really takes off telling someone else’s story about life in east Germany. The alt-right elements were sort of interesting, but -
and maybe this says more about me now and what I need - I was expecting an exploration of what might attract people to populism and conspiracy theories- I already know my liberal bias and hoped to get a different view. I’m breaking the rules by considering the book I’d like to have read, but as the writer is fixated on the self that seems somewhat appropriate.

Interesting, not essential, and a definite slog at times.

Choosing Red Pill by Hari Kunzru was a big mistake on part. The reviews for his previous novel were outstanding, how could I not like it?

‘Exquisitely attuned’
‘Electrifying, subversive and wildly original’
‘A book that everyone should be reading right now’
‘Haunting, doom-drenched, genuinely and viscerally disturbing…’

The only one of those quotes that applies to Red Pill is “doom-drenched”

Red Pill is about an academic writer who has lost his motivation to write while experiencing an existential crisis. He is awarded a grant to spend 3 months residency at a cultural foundation in Wannsee near Berlin where things go from bad to worse. I don’t know where the story might have gone as I gave up after dragging myself through about a quarter of the book.

Maybe I missed out, but I found Red Pill to be a slow paced, overly wordy, self indulgent dirge. This is literary fiction at its absolute worst.

The narrative of the first part of this book had echoes of The Dice Man for me. I think maybe because of the level of introspection and obsession by the narrator and the sense of paranoia it evokes. Anyway, memories aside, I was really excited to read this book as I had read, and loved The Impressionist some years ago, and I think this is as equally as good. It is a thought provoking and relevant book. It is also the style of book that is only truly appreciated once you’ve finished the book and the whole narrative comes together having been on an emotional roller coaster of a journey with the narrator. This book will stay with me for some time as I continue to reflect upon it.

A superbly accomplished novel.
Personal and professional angst leads an anonymous NY writer and family man to apply for a prestigious fellowship at the Deuter Centre in Berlin. Situated on the lakeside at Wannsee where Heydrich first presented his ‘Final Solution’ to the Nazi bigwigs, and where Austrian poet Kleist, who in a suicide pact in 1811 with his terminally ill girlfriend and muse, is buried,
Our narrator looks forward to being solitary, but is haunted by ‘ghosts’ and lack of self-worth, and he is under constant surveillance and monitoring at Deuter, in their transparent study carrels and 'social' mealtimes. He is unproductive and in his room, becomes obsessed with the violent internet phenomenon ‘Blue Lines’ and its alt-right director Anton. Gazing helplessly at the image of a refugee father and daughter, damage his grip on reality and self even further. The world, and his world, gradually seem more and more hopeless.
Following a meeting with the manipulative Anton, serious mental health issues follow, treatment in a secure unit and a near marital breakdown.
The ending leaves the book’s central conflict wide open as we see our narrator and his wife and friends ready to celebrate a Democratic victory in the US election of 2016, while lurking in the background of the Republican supporters on their tv screen is Anton, complete with red MAGA cap
There must be so many cultural references and symbols which I missed, but even so, I found it an enriching and rewarding novel to read.
Thank you #NetGalley and #Simon&Schuster for the privilege of reading a pre-release copy of Kunzru’s latest work.

This book was just too much for me. I very rarely don't finish a book but, at 77%, I realised I was just skimming and gave up. I can appreciate a book without having to fully understand the intellectual theories being discussed, but it was all going over my head. As the book progressed I lost all interest in the main character and was just trying to get through it. Having read other reviews, I would say that the problem lies more with me than with the book, but wanted to give an honest review and rating.

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 novel I’d recommend to everyone. It is in many ways, an unsatisfying read, 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.

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 was blown away by White Teeth a few years ago, finding myself lost in the fever dream of ghosts and violence. This is another fever dream by Hari Kunzru, though I found myself thinking more of The Yellow Wallpaper when reading this. There is a similar sense of an unreliable narrator to the point that you're not sure if it's the character in a gaslit spiral or if you're the one being gaslit. This is a rare contemporary novel that directly references the current American political moment without preaching - it just presents it in the exact horror of it.

Parts of the pacing didn't completely work for me and felt distracting - perhaps a product of my limited focus in these odd times.

Kunzru certainly knows how to write, and the novel is packed to the brim with literary allusions, historical insight, and literary criticism. A lengthy interlude about Communist East Germany is a particular highlight, even if it derails the story a little. The main narrative, about a novelist-cum-academic embarking on a literary fellowship in a highly regimented Berlin foundation could do with more propulsion, as well as more cohesion - threads are dangled here and there that are never fully picked up again (the gun range, the cleaner, the obnoxious academic), and perhaps the novel could and should have stayed within the confines of the Deuter Foundation. As such the novel loses its way, perhaps intentionally, as it reaches the two-thirds mark.

Kunzru can never be faulted for a lack of invention, and the main antagonist, a chimerical TV writer, leaps off the page with startling menace.

A whirling, startling, beautifully written tour of post-9/11, pre-Trump Europe and America, but perhaps a little more work on the characters and plot needed. Recommended.

At the beginning of the novel, our New York writer protagonist is going through a bit of a bad patch. His work isn’t going well, he’s not getting enough sleep and his marriage with human-rights lawyer Lei isn’t as good as it was. He needs a break. Then, he is offered a chance to take part in a writing retreat in Berlin for three months. He thinks he might write about lyric poetry, but really he just wants to get his head right and his life back.

He arrives in Berlin and it all goes wrong.

The rest of the novel deals with the protagonist’s struggles with his mental health. He becomes anxious, paranoid and obsessed with violence, power and the alt-right. His liberal leftist beliefs are challenged by a cop show that he starts streaming instead of working and when he meets the writer of the cop show at a celebrity party he is horrified, fascinated and humiliated by him. How do his beliefs square with the realities he sees in the world? What can he do? What should he do for himself and his family?

I found the book to be powerful and thought-provoking. The protagonist’s battle with his demons felt very real to me and even when he was acting irrationally I could see why he was doing it. A recommended read.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

In the craziness of 2020 I've been most enjoying books that in no way telegraph where they're going. If I see the end, even a few pages in, I'm ready to bolt. Which is why I loved Red Pill. I had no idea what was happening even as everything, page by page, was thrilling.

Our unnamed narrator takes a writing fellowship in Wannsee to recharge his life -- which right there is pretty funny, since Wannsee is most famous as the place where Heydrich and his good Nazi fellows plotted the Holocaust. The breakdown that follows is almost inevitable, pushed forward by a chilling institute, a bullying, self-satisfied academic (I think he taught me English in college), a communal writing room (the horror - really!), a television cop drama, and an alt-right television showrunner who takes an interest in our narrator only to destroy him for the sport of it.

It somehow all ties together, along with references to the Matrix, from where the title comes, and a brilliant story of the East German Ministry for State Security and its infiltration of the punk rock scene of the time. On the other side of the breakdown is where the magic comes as we begin to see the world through the fevered delirium of our narrator and, you know, it doesn't look all that different than what we're seeing now.

The final scene is both tragic and expected, as must be the final scene in all great tragedies. And everything is so clearly written, as in all Kunzru's work, that you feel like you've lived it yourself.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3377882621

I was keen to read this because I thought ‘White Tears’ by Hari Kunzru was amazing, and Red Pill did not disappoint. He’s an excellent storyteller.

This is ennui for the twenty first century. Our narrator, a Brooklyn based writer of Indian background is experiencing a mid life crisis and takes up a fellowship at a Berlin institute in order to sort himself out. Things don’t really go to plan however, the institute values ideas of openness and transparency, requiring fellows to work in a communal space and our narrator finds this impossible, seeing it as a violation of privacy. So he wanders about lake Wansee, the location of the institute or spends time in his room streaming a very violent cop show. Eventually, he encounters the show’s director, an exponent of alt-right ideas and becomes somewhat obsessed with tracking down and exposing him at a cost of losing his own sense of reality and breaking contact with his family.

An early fan of Hari Kunzru, I must admit I haven’t read any of his more recent novels. I found this new one highly convincing, perhaps because of the deliberate similarities between the author and the narrator. Red Pill is full of ideas and associations, the title obviously suggesting The Matrix, the Berlin location’s also obvious links with Nazis and the final solution and, to me less obvious, as the resting place of German Romantic writer von Kleist. There are links between von Kleist’s own unfulfilled potential (he committed suicide, aged 34) and the narrator’s crisis, he reads and rereads Kleist’s works and often visits his grave. There is also quite a bit on surveillance and privacy with the institute’s goal of ‘research into future development of a transparent public sphere’, abhorrent to the narrator. Additionally, as an interlude of sorts, the narrator’s cleaner tells her story of being forced to spy for the Stasi back in socialist days of GDR. This is all before we get to the alt-right encounter with Anton, the director of the violent cop show and his belief in the supremacy of the man of action (vs. man of thought) and the quasi-spiritual/ mystical power of the North. And everything that subsequently happens to the narrator, his obsessive, paranoid behaviour eventually does lead to him becoming somewhat at peace with himself, ironically, on the eve of the 2016 US election.

Red Pill is a thought provoking, inventive. In some ways, I found similarities with recent novels from Jenny Offil and Ben Lerner, the new ‘state of the nation’ in relation to self writing. Kunzru’s references and ideas are more wide ranging though and although impressive, on occasion, it felt a little too much. Still, it’s an excellent book, one that I’d highly recommend.

My thanks to Simon and Schuster, Scribner and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review Red Pill.

I loved this!
'Red Pill' starts as a very serious & intellectual kind of novel, which I wasn't really sure would work for me. But it then changes into something that is unpredictable, almost out of control and it's is all about obsession, paranoia, mental instability and it gets so interesting and wonderful! Great stuff :-)
Thank you Netgalley and Random House for the ARC

Red Pill is a slightly trippy novel that questions and delves in to the mindset of how we see reality. It's full of interesting thought provoking ideas that make you think.

"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 Wermacht officer turned respectable Christian Democrat turned famed industrialist, manufacture of Titanium_dioxide as part of the Wirtschaftswunder - 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 Wannsee_Conference. 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 Heinrich_von_Kleist.

Rather amusingly (at least to me) the narrator links von Kleist and his suicide with more modern-day Alt-Right trends - for example calling him 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 (Matrix xtyle) starts "falling down various rabbit holes"

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 "offer(s) me the red pill". and from there on is "living and moving in a matrix entirely designed by him"

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, Siege of Vienna 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: "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."

Kunzru's "Red Pill" reads in one-sitting; a noir exploration of the self that brings to mind Houellebecq's prose and Thomas Mann's work.

Between the states of insanity and perfectly rational is the fuzzy state of "going mad". Hari Kunzru's Red Pill is a deep dive into the process - when human mind starts questioning "reality"

An unnamed Indian origin author struggling with mid-life crisis gets an invitation to the Deuter center in Germany for a fellowship. He jumps at the opportunity leaving his wife and daughter, as an opportunity to write something.

The Idle mind is vulnerable and the environment at the center and his influences slowly play with his sense of right. Among his influences is a dead poet who gave up on humanity and fascist tv show that celebrates violence. Existential big questions vs social conduct. Voila Matrix - he gets consumed by thoughts that outpace his reason and he pulls you along the downward spiral into madness.

The ringside view into what seems like logical extrapolations was a scary bit. The book that closest resembled this was Something Happened by Joseph Heller which takes on 'normal'.

I thought it was getting predictable till he took on an unexpected route and re-united him with his family. How does 'moving-on' happen is something which is very realistically explored. In one of the poignant moments - Rei his wife asks him if she can trust no harm will come to her or their daughter from him.

The existential questions, the rise of the rejected ideas (Race supremacy) and arguments for/against self vs collective - definitely a well read thinking author(both). And the meta when a psychiatrist advice him to think less - nicely done.

An interesting read!

Note: An ARC of the book was provided through Netgalley in exchange for honest review

Red Pill is a novel about an author caught in an existential crisis of the modern alt-right, Trump age, and about how we treat the past and present. The unnamed protagonist leaves his wife and daughter in New York to take up a residency at the Deuter Centre in Berlin, where he plans to write his next book about lyric poetry. However, the Centre's rules and atmosphere aren't the retreat he expected, and he ends up flouting the rules, mostly to watch a violent cop show in his room. A chance encounter with the creator of the show at a Berlin party shows him that the world isn't a liberal bubble, and the grip he had on his own sanity starts to slip as the other man's ideas get into his head.

From the title, I'd expected something more focused on the alt-right, but actually it isn't until quite far into the novel that alt-right internet culture comes in, and the earlier parts of the novel are more concerned with the protagonist's creativity, a sense of history around both ideas and Berlin itself, and about rules and surveillance. There's a lot about the Enlightenment and specific thinkers which I didn't know much about, but having watched YouTube videos about debunking alt-right ideas at least gave me background on some of those points. Many of the ideas in the novel are more ideas than parts of the plot, but that is the point, and the protagonist is caught up trying and failing to connect ideas, and then later trapped in ideas. As I'd expected from having read White Tears, the atmosphere created in the novel is tense and strange, trying to get across the mental state of the often unreliable protagonist, and the tension is more in this atmosphere than the plot.

Red Pill is both what I expected and not, an unreliable trip down a rabbit hole of different ideas about the self, humanity, and the future, and a look at the world on the brink of Trump's presidency. As someone interested in Romanticism, Berlin, and internet culture, the ideas were gripping and threw up questions about trying to find meaning, both in the novel and life.

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.