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Blue Ruin

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Blue Ruin

By: Hari Kunzru
Narrated by: Hari Kunzru
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About this listen

 It's the 1990's, and Jay is an artist tipped for greatness. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, a promising career is already taking shape before him. Despite the brutal end of his intense relationship with Alice, his great love, he's destined to make his mark on the world as one of the most brilliant young creatives of the last century. Everyone is going to remember his name.

It's 2020, and Jay lives out of his car, working as a delivery driver in wealthy upstate New York. Sick and undocumented, Jay arrives at an enormous mansion and collapses from exhaustion --- right at the feet of Alice, whom he had hoped he would never see again. Twenty years on, and while Jay teeters on the edge, she's married the man she left him for; Jay's former best friend and fellow artist, Rob. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won't recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask, but when she does, she invites him to recover on the property, setting the stage for a devastating reckoning that's been decades in the making.

Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind. This is a novel suffused with tension and melancholy; an ode to an iconic art scene from an author at the height of his powers. Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological South Asian Creators
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Kunsra's narration of his own work is beautifully understated.
He is a wonderful story teller drawing the reader into the private, drug-induced hell of 2 young aspiring artists in the pretentious but seedy London art world. He spits his characters out decades later in pandemic ridden America and we hear of their separate lives in the intervening years. There's no great revelations in this book - just great, absorbing writing.

Past and present collide during pandemic paranoia.

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Such an accurate depiction of the London art school scene and pandemic. I loved the perspective it was written from and found some aspects hilarious for how silly but believable parts of the story were- so good!

Loved this book and its take on the art world

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This book should be called closure. I’m not really sure what the whole point of this was. The characters are well fleshed out but the plot is a little meh. There is a distinct beginning middle and end but it’s nothing to write home about. Also it’s very heavy on the art

Closure

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I’m a fan of Mr Kunzru and Blue Ruin is a bitingly cynical takedown of the art world wrapped in a love story circumnavigated through Covid. His decision to narrate his own books is unfortunate in my opinion. There are many talented narrators who would have done a much better job. The characters are hard to differentiate with his somewhat deadpan, unvarying tones. At one stage (much later in the book) he seems to remember one of his characters is Mancunian and quite unexpectedly adds a hitherto absent (and unintentionally hilarious) Yorkshire timbre to his speech. The same unimmersive reading style blighted Red Pill also. Stick to what you’re best at, Hari!

Blue Ruined, Great writer, one-dimensional narrator.

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Not quite up there with God's and Men but an interesting take on the fakery and commercial in modern art

Art and Craftiness

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