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Role Play - Clara Drummond

Role Play

By: Clara Drummond

Paperback | 15 July 2024

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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 Garçons. 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.
Industry Reviews

"A provocative and tightly wound novella about the way internalized capitalism slowly unravels one woman's sanity among the insanely rich of S?o 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

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