Did they invent it or did they discover it? Selfhood is a useful framework for understanding the concatenation of our many experiences, but likely also a creation of our own imagination. To put it simply, though, the self- that inward-focused, expressive, coherent core of individual identity- is something about which the Romantics suddenly have a great deal to say, beginning around the last decades of the nineteenth century, and it remains an obsession today. I have a few opinions on this subject as well, which could easily derail this post. In “ Red Pill“, the narrator is an academic from Brooklyn doing a residency at an isolated institute outside Berlin he is supposed to be dealing with the construction of the self in Romantic poetry, but his own sense of self seems to be unravelling. Both center on an introverted, lonely protagonist who lives largely in their own head, but nevertheless uncovers dark secrets in the outside world… they think. They’re both “political” novels in a sense and both deal to some extent with the thornier aspects of racist history. It was a yarn with perhaps the same amount of misdirection and subterfuge, but its knots were tied tighter and the payoff was simply better. #RED PILL HARI KUNZRU FULL#But, “ White Tears” was so good I read the full 271 pages in a single sitting. Make no mistake, Kunzru is a gifted fabulist who I read because my local book peddler friend is a fan, and I wouldn’t say “ Red Pill” isn’t worth a read. This week, I read two novels by a master storyteller, Hari Kunzru: “ White Tears” and “ Red Pill” (in the opposite order), and I found the trick worked better for me in the first novel than the second. It feels like we’re solving a mystery, even though the good ones always keep their secrets well hidden. When it works, there’s still something mysterious and uncanny about it all. The storyteller knows where all the bits and pieces are hidden and when we can see them, and slowly reveals what they want us to see, only when they want us to see it, misleading us throughout, until finally saving the best effect for the end. It seems to me that good storytelling works like a magic trick*.
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