Partly this energy is to do with the physical movement away from the enervation of the Deuter Centre – to Berlin itself, to Paris, to the Scottish islands – but mainly it is to do with a worthy antagonist: the bringer of true Zersetzung in the shape of Anton, a writer of a nihilistic TV show. Kinesis and purposefulness arrive in the prose as the novel begins to jump and buck and throw out ideas: “Meaning itself would be revealed as an artefact of a period that was slipping away into history” “Privacy is the exclusive property of the gods”. “Now,” Kunzru’s narrator writes, “what I think of when I think of my ‘self’ is the atrocious waste of years.” Now we’re getting down to it, I thought. This tells the story of Monika, a punk drummer persecuted by a Stasi agent, and is thoroughly absorbing – if, on first read, a little perpendicular to the whole.īy the third section – “Apocalpyse” – I was loving it. The second section, “Zersetzung” (Undermining), is named after the psychological warfare deployed by the Stasi to break down their subjects. I was reminded, too, of Georg Büchner’s 1836 story “Lenz”, one of the most famous breakdown stories of the period. The book’s epigraph (“no truth is discoverable here on Earth”) is from Kleist, a writer who murdered his female companion and then shot himself in Wannsee in 1811. And soon enough I was doing just that: Kunzru’s reillumination of the German Romantic period – Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist, Schopenhauer – sent me back to reinvestigate. His narrator writes “by generating a paratactical blizzard of obscure cultural references and inviting my reader to fall through it with me”. For one thing, Kunzru’s intelligence is an irresistible pleasure. Kunzru deploys a knowing lugubriousness to offset the privilege, but even the undeniably deft prophylactics of self-awareness cannot quite distract from a sense of wallow.īit by bit though, I was enlisted. He discovers himself “somewhat mollified” after being prepared a “light supper”, only to suffer from “exhaustion” while collecting his per diems. In the opening pages, I found Kunzru’s narrator’s tone too often to be one of shiftless complaint. I am also chary of breakdown novels there is such an immense and compelling canon in this crowded space – Thomas Bernhard, Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, Sylvia Plath, Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf … And I confess that I had misgivings at first: I dislike writers writing about writing retreats and fellowships. The first section is called “Wannsee”, the name of an area on the outskirts of Berlin where the narrator arrives for a three-month residency at the Deuter Centre in order to work on a book about “the construction of the self in lyric poetry”. Right from the off, then, we know we’re in for a book about the age-old quest for an understanding of the true nature of our circumstances – the human mind’s troubled confrontation with reality. The title of Hari Kunzru’s sixth novel is taken from the famous scene in The Matrix where protagonist Neo is offered a choice: the red pill will allow him to see reality, however abhorrent, while the blue pill will allow him to live inside the system’s simulations in ongoing and harmonious ignorance.
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