Em REFRESCO (Soft!), o novo livro do escritor inglês Rupert Thomson, a vida de três personagens é entrelaçada em uma história que mistura estratégias de vendas, manipulação, crime e amor. Barker Dobbs, Glade Spencer e Jim Lyle estão juntos neste romance dos anos 90, onde a premissa do marketing é levada a extremos: mudar o comportamento do consumidor para que ele compre mais de um determinado produto. |...| [Veja] – De Alex Garland (A Praia) a Nick Hornby (Alta Fidelidade), a literatura inglesa anda produzindo romances facilmente digeríveis, ancorados no universo pop. Poucos deles, no entanto, são tão envolventes e inusitados quanto Refresco. Imaginativo, para dizer o mínimo, o escritor Rupert Thomson narra um suspense ambientado em Londres. A história tem três vértices: um executivo que não mede esforços para aumentar a venda de um refrigerante; uma garçonete que sofre lavagem cerebral e passa a consumir compulsivamente o tal refrigerante; e o matador contratado para eliminá-la quando a experiência desanda. A proeza de Thomson está em explorar a confusão psicológica dos protagonistas com uma densidade difícil de achar em romances do gênero. |...| [Goodreads] 'At first glance, the thrillers of British author Rupert Thomson seem to have nothing in common except the expansiveness of his imagination and the lucid radiance of his writing. Air & Fire is about a group of French people sent to California at the end of the 19th century to build a church. The Insult is about a man blinded by a robber in a supermarket parking lot who discovers one night that --because of a bizarre experiment-- he can see again. Thomson's latest book, Soft!, finds three very different characters -- an aimless waitress, a reluctant hit man, and an ambitious young marketing executive -- linked by the sudden success of a new soft drink. But a closer look confirms the feeling that Soft! continues the author's fascination with the way science can bend and shape the destinies of all sorts of nonscientific people. Certainly Glade Spencer, the flaky young woman who flies off periodically for unpleasant encounters with her American lawyer boyfriend, has no idea when she signs up for a sleep clinic to earn some extra cash that the soda slogans planted in her brain could cause her death. Barker Dodds, the nightclub bouncer from Plymouth, doesn't know why he's being paid to kill Glade. And James Lyle, the striving marketer who thought up the brainwashing scheme in the first place, is deliberately out of the loop about its consequences. All three are so perfectly drawn that you'd recognize them on the street, and the way Thomson describes their quirky, weirdly decorated flats and lifestyles captures the flickering pulse of London with uncanny accuracy'. -- Dick Adler.
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Robson Souza12/11/2010Resenhou um livro
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Rupert Thomson
Once described by the critic James Wood as "one of the strangest and most refreshingly un-English voices in contemporary fiction", and compared to writers as various as Franz Kafka, J. G. Ballard, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Charles Dickens, Elmore Leonard and Mervyn Peake. Rupert Thomson (1955) made his debut in 1987 with Dreams of Leaving, a hilarious and tragic novel about an English village that has been cut off from the outside world by a dictatorial chief of police. Before that he wrote poems, short stories of exactly fifty words and worked for a while as a copywriter. (He stopped that because, by his own account, he earned too much money: “I was offered a big raise and to me that seemed like a trap. You run the risk of getting used to that money and then you never leave.”) Thomson is a meticulous writer, with a low publication rate: on average, he writes ten different versions of the same novel. Between 1987 and 2009 he published eight critically acclaimed novels novels, including The Insult, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and Death of a Murderer, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Prize. His sixth novel, The Book of Revelation, was made into a feature film in 2006 by the Australian writer/director, Ana Kokkinos. In 2010 he published a memoir, This Party's Got to Stop, which won the Writers' Guild Non-Fiction Book of the Year. His new novel, Secrecy, set in Florence in the 1690s, is inspired by the life and work of the unique, eccentric sicilian wax artist, Gaetano Giulio Zummo, native from Siracusa: "(...) a young man called Zummo — he really existed — is forced to flee his native Siracusa. The crimes he’s accused of are so heinous that they could destroy him. He travels to Palermo, then to Naples, but always has the feeling that his past is on his trail, and that he’ll never be free of it. Zummo is an artist who works with wax. He’s obsessed with the plague, and makes little wooden cabinets filled with graphic, tortured models of the dead and dying. In his late thirties he arrives in Florence at the invitation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who is overweight, gloomy, devout and obsessed with Marguerite-Louise, the woman he was married to, the woman who has left him. Zummo becomes the Grand Duke’s confidant and is asked to make a piece of work that borders on the illicit, a piece of work no one must know about. At the same time, Zummo has met a young woman who fascinates him. It turns out that she’s in possession of a secret even more dangerous than his own… It’s a thwarted love story, a murder mystery, an exercise in concealment and revelation, but above all it’s a kind of trapdoor narrative, one story dropping unexpectedly into another, the ground always slippery, uncertain". Reviewing Secrecy in the Financial Times, AN Wilson described the novel as "chillingly brilliant and sinister... masterly", while the Daily Mail called it "bewitching... intensely atmospheric... superb." Rupert Thomson has lived in many cities throughout the world, including New York, Sydney and Barcelona (from 2004 to 2010). He currently lives in South London.
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East Sussex, England (UK)