Role Play

(Paperback)

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Description

Vivian's gallery gig in Rio de Janeiro is more than a job. She's a curator, not just at work but in every aspect of her life. Her apartment has designer armchairs. Her wallet is Comme des Garons. Everything is selected and arranged, even her friends, culled from Brazil's richest families, who play the supporting cast in Vivian's ongoing performance of self. In Vivian's world, everything comes in excess, including her own caustic self-awareness. As she informs us, "I'm a misandrist and a misogynist," but she is fond of gay men, "the one type of human you can get along with as equals." The gravity of real life breaks through Vivian's ongoing act when she's confronted with an unexpected and awful proximity to police violence. Can she pause long enough to recast herself in a new role, one that fits her highly staged world and can account for the random and unpredictable Role Play examines the superabundances of Brazilian elites, their art and ethics, and their monied ambivalence in the face of social inequality, machismo, and violence. As sharp and sparkling as broken champagne flutes, Clara Drummond's prose is seductively frank and unflinching in its depiction of wealth's warping effects. Her third novel and her English-language debut, Role Play is a bold and hilarious book that places everything that affirms and informs the performance of self under a harsh spotlight.

Reviews

"Drummond's narrative voice is fiercely honest, coolly cynical, and sharply scathing . . . [the narrator] is not an especially appealing character; and yet, remarkably, Drummond manages to elicit readers' empathy for her, mining her most fundamental and human flaws and insecurities. An unsparing critique of Brazil's young elites."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Sharp . . . The book's power comes from [the narrator's] scathing assessment of the elite: rich people are painted as oblivious to the concerns of others, the artistic class as disingenuous in their calls for social equality, and even the protagonist herself as more interested in being glamorous and sexually desirable than anything else. Drummond's incendiary tale burns bright."
--Publishers Weekly

"Role Play is a twisted, painful, brilliantly written novel in the spirit of Clarice Lispector that allows the reader to truly feel the depth of one person's unexpectedly heartbreaking arc in the face of something much larger than herself."
--Lily Hunter, Booklist

"A provocative and tightly wound novella about the way internalized capitalism slowly unravels one woman's sanity among the insanely rich of So Paulo. Too real to be satire, too funny to be realism, and mordant all the way through."
--Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X

"Clara Drummond flays open the shiny world from which her characters come, unafraid to expose the faulty optics and damaging compromises at its decadent core. I loved this book very much."
--Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Hilarious, knife-sharp, and thrillingly alive. A glittering excavation of Rio's upper crust, our heroine's mind, and the absurdity of being alive right now. I loved it."
--Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different

"Clara Drummond's Role Play feels equal parts Eve Babitz and Thomas Bernhard, blending their hedonistic, troubled, occasionally comical excesses into an ultra-privileged millennial in contemporary Brazil. Daniel Hahn's exhilarating translation is hard to put down--I snorted it all the way to the end like the main character snorts her drugs."
--Fernando A. Flores, author of Valleyesque and Tears of the Trufflepig

"Clara Drummond wastes no time dropping the reader into this addictive slideshow of decadence and sex. Role Play is gorgeously catty, short and anything-but-sweet."
--Sloane Crosley, author of Grief Is For People

Author Bio

Clara Drummond is a Brazilian writer and journalist based in Lisbon, Portugal. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, and Marie Claire. Role Play is her third novel. Daniel Hahn is a writer, an editor, and a translator with about a hundred books to his name. Recent books include Catching Fire: A Translation Diary and translations of novels from Angola, Venezuela, and Guatemala. He is currently writing a book about Shakespeare and translation, and coediting a collection of Brazilian short stories.