Hari Kunzru
Autor(a) de The Impressionist
About the Author
Born in London and raised in Essex, Hari Kunzru is a freelance journalist and editor living in London.
Obras por Hari Kunzru
One For the Trouble 2 exemplares
Kaltes Klares Wasser 1 exemplar
Four Letter Word: New Love Letters (KNELMAN) 1 exemplar
Magda Mandela - story 1 exemplar
The World in Winter 1 exemplar
Associated Works
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Nome legal
- Kunzru, Hari Mohan Nath
- Data de nascimento
- 1969-12
- Sexo
- male
- Nacionalidade
- UK
- País (no mapa)
- UK
- Local de nascimento
- London, England, UK
- Locais de residência
- Essex, England, UK
London, England, UK - Educação
- Bancroft's School
University of Oxford (Wadham College)
University of Warwick (MA - Philosophy and Literature) - Ocupações
- journalist
author - Organizações
- English PEN
- Prémios e menções honrosas
- British Book Award (deciBel Writer of the Year, 2005)
Granta's Best of Young British novelists (2003)
Observer Young Travel Writer of the Year (1999)
Fatal error: Call to undefined function isLitsy() in /var/www/html/inc_magicDB.php on line 425- Hari Kunzru, né en 1969 d'une mère anglaise et d'un père indien, vit à Londres. Son premier roman, L'Illusionniste (Pion, 2003), couronné par le prix Somerset Maugham, l'a placé parmi les vingt meilleurs jeunes écrivains de l'année 2003, liste établie par la prestigieuse revue Granta.
Membros
Críticas
Listas
Indian Diaspora (3)
Diverse Horror (1)
Library TBR (1)
All Things India (1)
music to my eyes (1)
2020 (1)
Prémios
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 21
- Also by
- 16
- Membros
- 4,364
- Popularidade
- #5,750
- Avaliação
- 3.6
- Críticas
- 156
- ISBN
- 149
- Línguas
- 13
- Marcado como favorito
- 14
The narrator's crisis is essentially a crisis of Enlightenment and liberal values. On the one hand they are assailed by new knowledge in fields like neurochemistry, which argue that humans are nothing but neurons and chemical impulses. Just bits of matter, protons and electrons. If this is so, what gives humans any particular value? "Why do you believe in human rights?" the narrator urgently asks his wife, a human rights lawyer, at one point. "Isn't it just a fiction, though? Just something we tell ourselves? If we still believed in the soul, maybe." Her answer, "We're human. That's enough" is not close to enough.
On the other hand is something old and ancient: the human will to power, and the irrationality and bloodshed that marks human history. The narrator sees the rising again of an irrational tide that threatens the placid and rational reality everyone around him believes they are living in. This is specifically embodied by the rise of the alt-right in politics, which the narrator becomes obsessed with, though it's only a part of what he fears:
When the narrator runs into Anton, a fictionalized Steve Bannon, at a party of the rich and famous he's invited to by some acquaintances, he comes to believe he can resolve his crisis and save humanity and his family by defeating Anton in a final showdown that he is mysteriously being led to. Kunzru's hallucinatory digression mirrors what he did in his previous novel White Tears, though it feels more coherent here.
Our narrator's mental breakdown is brought to a sort of conclusion, however, not by a confrontation with Anton but by a stay in a mental hospital. Upon his release back to his family and social circle, which carries on in its "end of history" style complacency and incomprehension of his crisis, he sees a therapist and works to say the right things, but she is like everyone else with an unjustified faith in the victory of human rationality, and he tries to just shove down his worries.
The philosophy of Joseph de Maistre occupies a central role in the novel. Maistre, who was active in the time immediately following the French Revolution, believed that an evil in the world led to a never-ending procession of human bloodshed and violence, and that a rational attempt at government inevitably lead to unresolvable disagreement and competing claims of illegitimacy, giving rise to violence and chaos. Anton superficially adopts Maistre's philosophy, while the narrator is deeply disturbed by it.
To escape what he saw as the bleakness of the human condition, Maistre believed in God and a divinely ordered ultimate plan of redemption (a part of his philosophy Anton ignores). The narrator doesn't have access to this relief however; when Anton asks him if he's a Christian, admitting that Christianity does present a legitimate objection to his power obsessed worldview, he says no (modern scientific materialism has taken care of that, after all), marking himself as a "typical liberal" in Anton's eyes.
Kunzru doesn't end up offering the narrator much, in my opinion, in compensation with which to counter the existential darkness he faces. "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... Alone, we are food for the wolves. That's how they want us. Isolated. Prey. So we must find each other. We must remember that we do not exist alone", Kunzru writes in the novel's conclusion.
So, community and meaningful relationships. But the narrator had that at the start of the novel. It wasn't enough to answer.… (mais)