Role Play: A Novel [Paperback]

Role Playis a searing satire narrated by a wealthy young woman in Rio on the verge of a class-consciousness awakening.

Vivian is a curator, not just at her gallery gig in Rio de Janeiro, but in every aspect of her life. Her apartment has designer armchairs. Her wallet is Comme des Gar?ons. Everything is selected and arranged, even her lovers and friends. In Vivians world, everything comes in excess, including her own caustic selfawareness. As she informs us, Im a misandrist and a misogynist, but she is fond of gay men, the one type of human you can properly get along with as equals.

Role Playexamines the superabundances of Brazilian elites their art, ethics, and monied ambivalence in the face of social inequality, machismo, and violence. As sharp and sparkling as broken champagne flutes, Clara Drummonds prose is seductively frank and unflinching in its depiction of wealths power to warp the self.

Clara Drummondis a Brazilian writer and journalist based in Lisbon, Portugal. Her work has appeared inVogue,Elle,Harpers Bazaar, andMarie Claire.Role Playis her third novel.

Daniel Hahnis a writer, an editor, and a translator with about a hundred books to his name. Recent books includeCatching Fire: A Translation Diaryand translations of novels from Angola, Venezuela, and Guatemala. He is currently writing a book about Shakespeare and translation, and coediting a collection of Brazilian short stories.

Startlingly frank. . . this portrait of grotesque narcissism is just vulnerable enough to be moving.
Sam Sacks,The Wall Street Journal

Drummonds narrative voice is fiercely honest, coolly cynical, and sharply scathing . . . [the narrator] is not an especially appealing character; and yet, remarkably, Drummond manages to elicit readers empathy for her, mining her most fundamental and human flaws and insecurities. An unsparing clS