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Jaz and Lisa Matharu are plunged into a surreal public hell after their son, Raj, vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert. However, the Mojave is a place of strange power, and, by the time Raj reappears, inexplicably unharmed, the fate of this young family will have echoed the stories of all those who have traveled before them. Hari Kunzru's new novel is full of big ideas, but it's also built around a cast of flesh-and-blood characters, who all converge at a strange town in the shadow of a rock formation called the Pinnacles. Viscerally gripping and intellectually engaging, Gods without Men (Knopf) is, above all, a heartfelt exploration of the search for pattern and meaning in a chaotic universe.
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 finest novel yet... bringing to the angry activism of the young in the late sixties all the suspense of a spy thriller." (Lisa Appignanesi, author of Unholy Loves)
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 in the sixties he briefly became a terrorist, protesting the Vietnam War by setting bombs around London. And then one day a ghost from his past turns up on his doorstep, forcing Chris on the run.
As Chris flees, he remembers his days as an isolated youth, hopelessly in love with Anna Addison, following her as she threw aside conventionality. Chris's rival for Anna's affections, the charismatic Sean Ward, was the leader of the radical August 14th Group. Egging one another on, the three inched closer and closer to the edge, until the events of one horrifying night forced them apart, never to see one another again.
Gripping, moving, provocative, and passionate, My Revolutions brings to brilliant life both the radical idealism of the sixties and the darker currents that ran beneath it, the eddies of which still shape our history today.
Review:
"It is 1998 and Michael Frame, the British narrator of Hari Kunzru's powerful third novel, 'My Revolutions,' is in a spot of trouble. His marriage is foundering, his stepdaughter doesn't understand him, somebody is using him to blackmail a high-ranking member of Parliament, and — worst of all — his wife is planning a party for his 50th birthday. Perfectly good reasons to take off in a Beemer and... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) head for the former lover he thinks he spotted in a charming French village. It's the stuff of your basic coming-of-middle-age story, a Richard Russo novel perhaps, or even something by Peter Mayle, except Kunzru is plowing much darker terrain. In these types of stories, the present and the past are usually neatly weighed one against the other, and Kunzru pulls off the switches between the two with admirable clarity. But Michael Frame's present is strangely insubstantial. He is a mere hanger-on to his wife's life, a 'country life, but with plumbing and telecoms and antibiotics.' In fact, he is as much a mystery to his family as he is to us. Yet Michael remembers his past with loving, almost obsessive detail, and this dark past is the heart of the novel. Michael comes of age in the shadow of two wars, the world war fought by the men in his working-class neighborhood, men 'who'd all seen and done wartime things yet mysteriously chose to mark physics homework or sell pork chops to my mother,' and the Cold War, with its constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Arrested at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration during his freshman year and sentenced to six weeks in a brutal prison, he emerges thinking in purely political terms: 'What paper had I signed? Where had I said I wished to regulate my habits and govern my sexual behavior and strive for advancement in various abstract games whose terms had been set before I was born? The state claimed it was an expression of the democratic will of the people. But what if it wasn't?' 'My Revolutions' is filled with such pronouncements, both in its dialogue and in the series of brilliantly concocted manifestos, impassioned and deranged, that run through the story. Each declaration leads chillingly to the next, until the words of Mao come to the fore: 'In order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun.' By 1970 Michael has become a full-fledged member of the revolutionary underground, stealing cars, throwing bombs, living in fear under the assumed name of Michael Frame. In detailing Michael's story to its bitter yet affecting end, Kunzru is trying to document the history of a host of groups — from the Weather Underground in the United States to the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany to the Angry Brigade of Britain, the model for this book — and their step-by-step descent from peace-and-love idealism to base violence. Kunzru takes to this daunting task with such energy and specificity that the novel feels more like a bracing historical record than a work of fiction. Through it all, he walks a delicate line, trying to keep our sympathy for the members of Michael's underground organization even as it succumbs to the terrible logic of the bomb. It's no accident that the book is set before Sept. 11, when such sympathy might still have been possible. In his first novel, 'The Impressionist,' Kunzru proved himself an uncommonly gifted writer, in full control of his language, plot and ripe humor. But he chooses here to keep Michael's reminiscences so unrelentingly grim that it feels like he's loading the dice. Michael's group is earnest enough to make your teeth ache, and never has free love seemed less erotic. Even the old girlfriend Michael spies in France, an uber-revolutionary chick and horn of the novel's love triangle, is more frightening than sensual, all sharp angles and angry discipline. 'Pleasure wasn't relevant to the struggle,' Michael remembers. 'It was only through the struggle that we could materialize ourselves in a meaningful way.' Would you like fries with that? It's as if Kunzru is afraid to admit that the Doors ever existed or that a sort of Dionysian ecstasy was often a direct conduit to politics. For all the fun Michael's having, he might as well have been in law school. But the questions Kunzru raises about politics and violence continue to burn today, just as the fault lines created in the '60s persist in our public life. Is today's left simply a vestigial collection of hippie-revolutionaries intoxicated with drugs, sex and political-sloganeering, treading a path that leads only to nihilism? Is today's right led by a bunch of outsiders who were too timid or uncool to dive into the youth culture of their time, salving old slights by accumulating the power and wealth necessary to reverse everything that culture achieved? And why can't everyone just get over it already? In jail, Michael meets Miles Bridgeman, who, like many villains, becomes the most intriguing figure in the book. His shoes are a little too posh, his questions a little too pointed. 'Miles always jumped on things. He was never content until he'd pinned them down, all the specifics, the whys and wherefores.' One can't help but think of the author as he dutifully researched his way into the heart of this story. Miles is a filmmaker, and Michael self-righteously scoffs at his artistic pretensions: 'It's going to take more than montage to start the revolution.' In response, Miles asks the crucial question about the world Michael hopes to create: 'But what would it look like?' 'I saw myself walking down the street smiling,' Michael thinks. 'I saw a sunny day. Everything I saw looked like an advertisement.' Throughout his journey to the revolution and back, Michael is never able to adequately answer Miles' question. Kunzru lets us know it's still out there, waiting." Reviewed by Tyler Knox, who is the author of 'Kockroach', Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"Captures the muddled idealism of the young and its easy perversion into violence... and offers some clues to a better understanding of terrorism today. It's a daringly ambitious thing for a writer to attempt, but he pulls it off for a thrilling and moving read." Daily Mail
Review:
"An urgent and passionate piece of work... fairly afire with an anger on behalf of the world's dispossessed and powerless that is so conspicuously absent from much cozy and collusive current fiction." The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
Review:
"A sharp reminder, as sharp as tomorrow's headlines, of how the past will insist on haunting the present. Hari Kunzru writes a clear, clean, elegant prose, and his presentation of political realities is worryingly real." John Banville
Review:
"Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions is the book I'm telling people to grab. Kunzru is burning up in this novel. He spins a superb tale and his narrator's plummet down the radical rabbit-hole had me from page one." Junot Diaz, the National Book Critics Circle'sMost Recommended list, winter 2008
Review:
"[A]n extraordinary autumnal depiction of a failed '60s radical....It is a measure of how respectfully Kunzru treats his characters' yearning for a more generous time that My Revolutions feels less like an elegy for their era and more like a requiem for our own." New York Times
Review:
"[An] inquiry into the metaphysics of rebellion, a novel that frames radicalism as a spiritual path." Los Angeles Times
Hari Kunzru is the author of The Impressionist, Transmission, and the short story collection Noise. He was named one of Granta's "Twenty Best Fiction Writers Under Forty." The Impressionist was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist; was shortlisted for The Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and a British Book Award; and was one of Publishers Weekly's Best Novels of 2002. Kunzru is a contributing editor of Mute magazine and sits on the executive council of English PEN . He has written for a variety of international publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The London Review of Books, and Wired.
Larry Robinson, February 26, 2009 (view all comments by Larry Robinson)
An incredibly well written, really interesting look at Britain in the '60s. I listened to the audio book and the performance by Simon Prebble was great.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (2 of 3 readers found this comment helpful)
evebarrow, June 2, 2008 (view all comments by evebarrow)
I have a lot of good things to say about this book, but when I finished, I was thinking, "oh, he wrote this one to get on the Booker Short List."I don't know if that is a bad thing, and if Booker recognition enables/ encourages Kunzru to keep on producing novels, that is a good thing. The Chris Carter part of the book has so many vivid scenes, and they make the Michael Frame parts so lacking in comparison (except for 2 short and vivid scenes of "God" which just bring the character type to life with an incredible economy of words. The book has a lot there to spark introspection about personal activism, and about what alledged activisim looks like today (measuring our carbon footprints and shopping at Whole Foods). Read the book!
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
"Review"
by Daily Mail,
"Captures the muddled idealism of the young and its easy perversion into violence... and offers some clues to a better understanding of terrorism today. It's a daringly ambitious thing for a writer to attempt, but he pulls it off for a thrilling and moving read."
"Review"
by The Sunday Telegraph (UK),
"An urgent and passionate piece of work... fairly afire with an anger on behalf of the world's dispossessed and powerless that is so conspicuously absent from much cozy and collusive current fiction."
"Review"
by John Banville,
"A sharp reminder, as sharp as tomorrow's headlines, of how the past will insist on haunting the present. Hari Kunzru writes a clear, clean, elegant prose, and his presentation of political realities is worryingly real."
"Review"
by , winter 2008,
"Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions is the book I'm telling people to grab. Kunzru is burning up in this novel. He spins a superb tale and his narrator's plummet down the radical rabbit-hole had me from page one." Junot Diaz, the National Book Critics Circle'sMost Recommended list
"Review"
by New York Times,
"[A]n extraordinary autumnal depiction of a failed '60s radical....It is a measure of how respectfully Kunzru treats his characters' yearning for a more generous time that My Revolutions feels less like an elegy for their era and more like a requiem for our own."
"Review"
by Los Angeles Times,
"[An] inquiry into the metaphysics of rebellion, a novel that frames radicalism as a spiritual path."
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