Refresco

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.