My Revolutions: A Novel
Hari Kunzru
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0452290023
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
?Powerful? (The New Yorker), ?extraordinary? (The New York Times Book Review), and ?brilliant? (Entertainment Weekly)?you won?t be able to put down this new novel by the award-winning bestselling author of The Impressionist
Critics have compared him to Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Tom Wolfe, and Don DeLillo. Granta dubbed him ?one of the twenty best fiction writers under forty.? Now Hari Kunzru delivers his best novel yet.
Chris Carver is living a lie. His wife, their teenage daughter, and everyone in their circle know him as Michael Frame, suburban dad. They have no idea that as a radical student during the sixties he briefly became a terrorist? protesting the Vietnam War by setting off bombs. Until one day a ghost from his past turns up on his doorstep, forcing Chris on the run.
don’t know why I’m paying my taxes.” My mother asked if I wanted more gravy. I pushed my chair back and left the house. So Trafalgar Square was part of a new life, a project of selfinvention. I’d come on the march with my friends, who were all members of something called the Vietnam Action Group, one of a dozen di,erent councils and committees that existed at my university, all dedicated with varying degrees of clarity to the proposition that ending America’s war in Vietnam was our special duty.
lives of political activists and young people moving out of the cities to create a new existence in the countryside. He wanted to illustrate the existential poverty of the System. He wanted to propagandize for internationalism, for a free and progressive style of life. He’d been to America, and to Sweden. Things were very free in Sweden. “Cinema is a weapon,” he said, “for changing consciousness.” I was uncomfortable with the topic of consciousness, which was a problem, since in those days
cracked front door took possession of a bottle of Wray & Nephew’s rum and a quarter of powerful-smelling weed. After we’d eaten I lounged around on the rug as Sean unsuccessfully mined Vicky’s record collection for rock music. Within an hour or so we were back on the road, several shots into our game and walking with a swagger that, while not yet a stagger, was already showing transitional signs. Just after eleven Sean handed me a tiny barrel-shaped tablet and some time around midnight I came up
frustration of wanting her. Afterward she lay in my arms and I felt, narcissistically, that we’d sealed some kind of bargain. Early the next morning I woke up to -nd Sean sitting at the end of the bed, shirtless, smoking a roach he’d -shed out of last night’s over.owing ashtray. Anna was asleep next to me, one arm thrown over my chest. He was examining us, a curious look on his face. In the gray half-light the blurred tattoo on his chest was an amorphous stain, a Rorschach blot. I asked him where
her friend. They both shook their heads. “La Suédoise?” suggested the friend. “Suédoise?” I asked eagerly. “Elle est suédoise?” They nodded warily, pursing their lips at my insistence. The thin one pointed to the next-door house. “Elle habite là?” I asked. They adopted the closed expressions of respectable women who know there is a limit to the amount of information one should give a foreigner in the street. Realizing they weren’t going to reply, I thanked them and walked on. So I’d been