Red Pill

I got about 33% through, or about 100 pages in. I feel the subject matter the book touches on could have been approached better. The whole thing with him running off to Berlin for a book he wasn't even gonna try to work in frustrated me and felt unnecessary. if it was focused on just his experience with the TV show and being with his family as he sees this rise of radicalization take place I would have been more absorbed, but everything about the first half just made me not care for him or any of the story. 

It almost lost me in the middle there (too dark, too hopeless, too obtuse. an obstinate main character who seemed to rebuff my every attempt at empathy), but the last few paragraphs are worth the price of admission imho. Anyone who was Too Online in Nov 2016 can see themselves reflected here.

Man on the brink of the abyss, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog - Yet instead of being overwhelmed and awestruck by the beauty and cruel vastness of nature, our protagonist is overwhelmed, immobilized and slowly rendered mad by the terror and darkness that seems to be invading the world around him. It's a feeling we all have been experiencing to same capacity during the last couple of years.

This was a wild ride, starting out on a writers retreat with musings about writing and creation, then slowly transforming into a dream-like paranoia about surveillance and 18th century German romanticism, and finally ending on very topical issues of media-manipulation and radicalization.

‘Anton' was a regular Mephisto is this tale, and I'd be very curious if he (and his TV show) was based on anyone in particular.

“Your time is a finite and dwindling resource” pg 10
“Plot is the artificial reduction of life's complexity and randomness” pg 62
“The truth is savages should always eat the anthropologist” pg 67
“I realized that my fear of exposure didn't stem from shame, or even the importance I attached to my little secets, but from their inconsequence.” pg 81

I went into Red Pill knowing nothing about it. This is why I love the Tournament of Books, I would never have picked this one up without some urging. Just the Matrix-infused title alone put me off, but I picked it up.
Quite honestly, it is the most Gen X thing I have read in a long while, and it was really refreshing. Our narrator walks around with an impending sense of doom. He tries to make sense of life through art and literature. It doesn't work out so well for him.
Monika's story was amazing, and I almost wish she had her own book and that I'd been reading that.
At one point, I said aloud (to no one), “If Anton turns out to be Tyler Durden, I am throwing this f-ing thing across the room.”
YMMV but, to me, Red Pill stabbed at the idea of there must be more to this existence despite an ingrained belief that existence is meaningless. It's easier to believe it is all a construct. We are doomed either way. How do THEY know what chicken tastes like, anyway?

“What if the reasonable reaction is endless horrified screaming? pg 192. Exactly!

Here's some chipper advice from the therapist, “Accept that might have conventional horizons, that conventional things could make you happy. Stop asking for life to be a poem.”pg 207

Sure! Toe the line. Don't' make waves. Eat your quinoa bowl and be happy about it.
Honestly, Red Pill reminded me that we are all heroes for not going insane (outwardly) every day.
Also, to relive the 2016 election night in the final chapter- when finally something happens to wake others up to the panic of existence the narrator is battling, was blood pressure destroying. Too soon, maybe?

RED PILL by Hari Kunzru is a wild, divisive ride, and I'm still trying to figure out if I liked this book or not