Hari Kunzru never has a problem coming up with the premise of his books, and as they unfold, the stories have a trademark style of gathering pace and Proust-like, sending us on wild-goose chases that suddenly turn up a nugget of gold, linking us to the theme of the book. His darker appearance does nothing to comfort him as he wades through the surrounding areas, still rattling with ideas of white supremacy, and stumbles into the underbelly of the town in chaotic fashion.Īs obsesses over a tawdry TV cop show, scanning for actor’s lines that seem to be straight out of legendary works of philosophy, connections that may or may not be there emerge in this story that may or may not be his final piece written at the retreat. The narrator finds himself attached to the cleaner of the residence, whose startling circumstances push him to come to think of his own writing as banal and narcissistic, seeing patterns in everything around him as if another reality were hiding in plain sight. ![]() As the residence cramps his style (communal areas for working, overbearing colleagues who tease him) he is drawn to the history of the place around him, exploring German Romanticism and the 19th-century murder-suicide of writer Kleist, a strange chap who campaigned (and not for long) for a female companion to kill before taking his own life, on the land the residence occupies. The narrator, a writer we can assume is, like Kunzru, of mixed Kashmiri descent, accepts a prestigious place in a writers’ retreat in Wannsee, the Berlin setting for the Nazi’s Final Solution talks. This offering from British novelist Hari Kunzru pulls at the threads of a crumbling world to discover we’ve been in this special hell before. A faux-autobiographical story of a frustrated middle-aged writer and his pending breakdown explores despotism in all its forms.
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