Worst. Person. Ever.
Oct 2013 · Random House
3,6star
19 reviewsreport
eBook
336
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About this eBook
A razor-sharp portrait of a morally bankrupt and gleefully wicked modern man, Worst. Person. Ever. is Douglas Coupland's gloriously filthy, side-splittingly funny and unforgettable novel.
Meet Raymond Gunt. A decent chap who tries to do the right thing. Or, to put it another way, the worst person ever: a foul-mouthed, misanthropic cameraman, trailing creditors, ex-wives and unhappy homeless people in his wake. Men dislike him, women flee from him.
Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Gunt, in the words of the author, "is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id." He's a B-unit cameraman who enters an amusing downward failure spiral that takes him from London to Los Angeles and then on to an obscure island in the Pacific where a major American TV network is shooting a Survivor-style reality show. Along the way, Gunt suffers multiple comas and unjust imprisonment, is forced to re-enact the ‘Angry Dance’ from the movie Billy Elliot and finds himself at the centre of a nuclear war. We also meet Raymond's upwardly failing sidekick, Neal, as well as Raymond's ex-wife, Fiona, herself ‘an atomic bomb of pain’.
Even though he really puts the ‘anti’ in anti-hero, you may find Raymond Gunt an oddly likeable character.
Meet Raymond Gunt. A decent chap who tries to do the right thing. Or, to put it another way, the worst person ever: a foul-mouthed, misanthropic cameraman, trailing creditors, ex-wives and unhappy homeless people in his wake. Men dislike him, women flee from him.
Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Gunt, in the words of the author, "is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id." He's a B-unit cameraman who enters an amusing downward failure spiral that takes him from London to Los Angeles and then on to an obscure island in the Pacific where a major American TV network is shooting a Survivor-style reality show. Along the way, Gunt suffers multiple comas and unjust imprisonment, is forced to re-enact the ‘Angry Dance’ from the movie Billy Elliot and finds himself at the centre of a nuclear war. We also meet Raymond's upwardly failing sidekick, Neal, as well as Raymond's ex-wife, Fiona, herself ‘an atomic bomb of pain’.
Even though he really puts the ‘anti’ in anti-hero, you may find Raymond Gunt an oddly likeable character.
Ratings and reviews
3,6
19 reviews
A. J. Shapiro
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28 November 2015
One of the worst, most dislikeable, pointless books I've read. Rehashed themes, contrived shallow dialogue, lazy humourless bodily function jokes, a plot that is impossible to care about, one dimensional characters that read like a writer's tool except there's no didactics going on here its just this happens then this happens then this happens interspersed with a few encyclopedia references and a lot of lechery. And his nuclear bomb/end of the world schtick, of course. Unedifying, unenlightening and unfunny
Phil Waud
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08 August 2015
Well I love his earlier work, but I just don't get this drivel that he is producing now. I persevered to the end, hoping for a "girlfriend in a coma" moment, but the only pleasure was that I can now start another book.
Nick Reid
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09 May 2014
Hilarious, comic and endlessly inventive. Some amazing dialogue, can't bear to have to wait at least another year for another chapter of 'the world according to Mr Coupland!' He provides a marvellous antidote to modern valueless society.
About the author
Douglas Coupland (pronounced KOHP-lend) (born 30 December 1961) is a Canadian writer, designer and visual artist. His first novel was the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Since then, Coupland has written twelve more novels, which have been published in most languages. He has written and performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company and is a columnist for the Financial Times. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, e-flux, Dis and Vice. In 2000, after a decade of generating web graphics, Coupland amplified his visual art production and has recently had two separate museum retrospectives: 'Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything' at the Royal Vancouver Art Gallery, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art; and 'Bit Rot' at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam and Villa Stuck in Munich. In 2015 and 2016, Coupland was an artist-in-residence in the Paris Google Cultural Institute.
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