Vernon Subutex 2
A Novel
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Part social epic, part punk-rock thriller, writer/filmmaker Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy continues the Man Booker International Prize shortlisted sprawling tale of an ex-record shop clerk’s celebrity fortunes and misfortunes.
The basis for the TV show of the same name available on streaming.
Rock star Alex Bleach might be dead, but he has a secret. It’s a secret that concerns several people, but the only person who can unlock it is Vernon Subutex, former record shop proprietor turned homeless messiah and guru, last seen hallucinating and feverish on a bench. He has tapes of Alex that will shake the world. The hunt is on, and the wolves are closing in.
Meanwhile, the cast of lovers and killers in Vernon’s orbit is in violent disarray. Aïcha wants to know the truth behind the death of her mother, the porn star Vodka Satana. And if she finds the bastards responsible, she wants to make them pay, whatever Céleste thinks of her plan. Céleste wants Aïcha to get a grip and stop hanging around with Subutex’s gang of disciples. The Hyena wants to find the Bleach tapes. She wants to untangle her complicated feelings about Anaïs, her boss’s assistant. And speaking of her boss, she does not want Laurent Dopalet to discover how badly she has double-crossed him.
Big-shot producer Laurent Dopalet wants the Hyena to find and destroy the Bleach tapes. He wants to forget he ever knew Vodka Satana. He wants people to stop graffitiing his apartment with ludicrous allegations. Above all, he wants people to understand: NONE OF THIS IS HIS FAULT.
"Virginie Despentes's Vernon Subutex trilogy is the zeitgeistiest thing I ever read." —Nell Zink, Bustle, "The Best Books of the 2010s"
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The apparent deaths by drug overdose of indie rock star Alex Bleach and his porn star ex-girlfriend unite a motley crew of armchair investigators in this rollicking second volume of a trilogy set in 2014 Paris. Vernon Subutex, a middle-aged former record store owner and sometime DJ, now homeless, was a close friend of Bleach and has in his possession videotapes containing a late, unseen interview with him. Though Vernon is oblivious to the interview's value, the venal film producer Laurent Dopalet, who hears about the tapes from a screenwriter, is not. In Dopalet's effort to track down Vernon and confiscate the tapes, which it's hinted might compromise Dopalet, he hires a fixer named the Hyena, who in turn encounters a rogue's gallery of Gen-X punks and their millennial successors, among them another porn star, a tattoo artist, a recent convert to Islam, a struggling screenwriter, an alt-right menace, and a number of Vernon's former lovers and fellow homeless. As clues mount regarding the true cause of the deaths, Vernon becomes through no effort of his own a sort of messianic figure to an unlikely band of the dissolute and the marginalized. Despentes, a former record store clerk and sex worker, makes an improbably intricate latticework of strange bedfellows brilliantly come to life. "Relationships," observes the Hyena, "feed on events that seem trivial, but each one is a screw that turns and opens the way to unexpected levels of understanding." Such is the snowballing effect of this sexed-up epic, an achievement greater than the sum of its wildly colorful parts.
