What an interesting little slice of life. I will admit that I don't feel particularly well informed on the machinations of the Brazilian elite, but this story felt relatively applicable to rich kids everywhere. There were several interesting meditations on the idea of accountability and action—specifically the idea that the wealthy don't want to witness violence or ugliness because then they'll feel compelled to think about it, and wouldn't it really be easier to not have witnessed it at all? I found the style a bit entrancing, with short, choppy language and an almost stream of conscious manner of conveyance. I would love to read more from this author, perhaps in a longer form; this short book made its points but I didn't feel like I got a great sense of the author's style or priorities.

I think this would be a good fit for Elif Batuman or Laurie Petrou, both in style and content.

Thank you to FSG and FSG Originals for the opportunity to read and review!

Role Play was an excellent read, a great work in translation. I love Drummond's writing and would read more from her in the future.

A satirical take of the privileged class in Rio, as told by a daughter of rich parents (she describes their wealth by the square footage of their various properties) turned art curator / socialite.

Role Play is a slim novel packed full of Vivian's pithy and sarcastic observations as she goes from party to club to church, filling us in on her upbringing along the way. She's cutting to everybody both old and young, the mostly rich, with some brutal commentary on the class differences she experiences in Rio. It's not pretty.

My thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC.

I am so thankful to Clara Drummond, Netgalley and FSG for granting me advanced access to this read before it hits shelves on June 4, 2024, unfortunately it just wasn't for me. I am still really thankful though.

Role play is a fascinating novel about excess but not showing too much excess, inauthenticity with the appearance of authenticity, and participating because you can, not because you have to.

We follow Vivian, a member of Brazil’s upper class, (according to her family, they’re actually just middle class) as she hangs around the art world and flirts with having a conscious. When Vivian witnesses an act of police brutality inflicted on her neighbor she decides not to intervene but rather return to her gluttonous life of sex and drugs. We follow Viviane as she recounts her upbringing which may serve as an explanation of why she is the way she is, but also maybe she’s just a sociopath. As Vivian continues keeping up her social appearance, the event she witnessed with her neighbor comes to knock on her flashy exterior, is it emptiness or empathy lurking behind the drugged up veneer?

I read this book like one long white line, a wild and grotesque ride start to finish. Thank you to @fsgbooks for the advanced epub! Role Play by Clara Drummond is out June 4th.

Interesting reflection on class, wealth and privilege from a “middle-class” woman (her parents only have three cars). Vivian is an art curator and has also carefully designed her social life. She is so focused on her own events that she almost ignores the horrors beyond the edge of her sights - across the street, for example. I think the book could have contained a little more plot, but the humor is also in the extensive descriptions and reflections of Vivian who tries to justify her own navel gazing. Nice satire!

Role Play by Clara Drummond gave me mixed feelings. I liked reading a book about a different culture - even if the main character was insufferably privileged. What I didn't like is that it seemed like there was no point to the book, there was no formal narrative arc, it felt like a pointless stream of consciousness like a poorly written book of essays.

This was a fascinating read, but I don't really know people to whom I can recommend it. I guess I will give it 4-stars for me, but only 3-stars because my inability to think of people to whom I could recommend it,

The more I think about it, the more I like it. It is terrific satirical writing.

For a short book, Clara Drummond manages to pack a lot within these pages! I was first captivated by the vibrant cover and the premise sounded really enticing. Vivian was a really interesting and unlikeable character to follow (my favorite kind to read). The writing was dreamlike and easy to follow, and I really loved how Drummond is able to depict the struggles of mental health. Last chapter really won me over. Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for this read!

3.5/5. This book was very honest and raw in its depiction of our privileged protagonist. I appreciated the creative risks our author took in depicting a flawed protagonist, but felt that many of the chapters simply contributed nothing to our protagonists' very loose story.

I also struggled a lot with Drummond’s writing. Many of these sentences are super long trains of thought with many, many commas breaking the sentence apart. This flow of consciousness can certainly be appealing to some readers, but it was a huge part of my initial struggle with the story.

What bumped my rating up a decent amount was the last chapter of this book. I mean… just wow!!! It is extremely difficult to put into words how connected I felt to our protagonist in that moment. Drummond truly has a gift of making you take on the life of another person. The prose was utterly dreamlike and took on such a different, significant tone to me.

One of my favorite quotes from the last chapter was: “Sex fulfills the same function as dreaming, it reveals who we are through encrypted language – but we hardly ever remember our dreams.”

Thank you to the author, publishers, and NetGalley for access to this arc!

Vivian, the protagonist of  Clara Drummond's short novel Role Play, is a young woman from a wealthy family who lives in Rio de Janeiro and works as a curator at an art gallery. The story is written as an inner monologue, commenting on the events Vivian witnesses, the most dramatic of which is a case of police brutality.

Vivian is beautiful, intelligent, and an excellent observer. Surrounded by her equally gorgeous friends, she devotes most of her time to sex, parties, and drugs. In her words, "there is no such thing as a rich person who is genuinely good," and indeed, her wealth seems to be a handicap. She knows how shallow her everyday life is but doesn't care about changing it. Full of self-deprecating, ironic remarks and sharp, excellent descriptions of other people in her life, Vivian's character looks like a modern, spoiled rich girl who tries to find distractions to convince her that everything is fine. If something or someone - like Darlene, a woman selling beer in front of Vivian's place - succeeds in piercing Vivian's carefully constructed barrier, the sensitive side that we see is short-lived and quickly buried under another few hours-long sex and drugs. However, the protagonist of Role Play is never simplistic; on the contrary, I found Vivian complex and thus fascinating.

This novel is a biting satire, and for me, it was a rather depressing read, more sad than funny. I didn't see the joy in Vivian's life. She was really trapped in her situation, playing a role that society expected her to play.   I couldn’t escape the question – when will Vivian be in ten years? What role will she play then? This short book gave me more food for thought than I expected.

3.5

I love books with morally grey female protagonists and Vivian fit the bill perfectly. She was incredibly privileged, unlikeable but also funny. I enjoyed the humour and sarcasm. Despite being short, it packed a real punch and Vivian was well fleshed out. I also think the mental health portrayal was well done. Would love to read more of the authors work in the future.

Big thanks to NetGalley for the eARC!

3.75 ⭐️
Vivian is greatly self absorbed and morally grey making her a comically entertaining unlikeable narrator. Within the short span of this book, her character is thoroughly developed as we follow her inner monologue through how self absorbed, performative and contradictory all of her actions are. Definitely recommended for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Halle Butler and The Guest by Emma Cline.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar Straus Giroux for the e-ARC!

Role play follows Vivian, a young, wealthy woman in Brazil whose worldview and self perception is disturbed when she is witness to police brutality, after which she attempts to balance the moral repurcussions of ambivalence to such an event and the re-curation of her self image in a way that feels most socially advantageous
This book so wonderfully encapsulates every wealthy young woman/person who curates their image, the likes of which are regularly seen among influencers. The person who does things 'for the plot,' engaging in performative activism while carefully maintaining their wilful ignorance of real issues.
Perfect for fans of Otesssa Moshvegh.

Strong and well done work about an incredibly dislikable protag. Thanks so much for the ARC netgalley

I wasn't sure how I felt about this one at first. our protagonist, vivian, is very shallow, pretentious and privileged (and v aware of these qualities) - which I guess is the point, but even knowing that, it took me a sec to care about this kind of narration. that said, I did love the (often very pseudo) social criticism and the way it was almost always centered around Vivian's own self-image / self-obsession - I think it was a very honest portrayal of the ugly + egotistic underbelly of the human experience. I also appreciated the exploration of her own mental health struggles in relation to her present-day observations, et al, and probably would've liked to learn more about her. I will say, the last chapter was the best part, and turned my rating around a bit.

3.5 stars, rounded down to 3 for the sake of the review.

thanks netgalley and FSG for the arc!

Across her slim, slick, razor-sharp takedown of Brazil's self-obsessed, silver-spooned elites, Clara Drummond stages the collision of several seemingly incongruous worlds: the favela and the filthy rich; the down-to-earth and the out-of-touch; the self-aware and the inconsiderate, the insensitive, the thoughtless.

From her very first line, Drummond's protagonist, Vivian, an art curator who has carefully arranged every facet of life to her liking - her furniture, her fashion sense, her group of friends - reveals herself as a walking, talking contradiction; the millennial manifestation of self-delusion and cognitive dissonance: "I'm a misandrist and a misogynist [...] But I'm not a misanthrope 'cause I do like gay men". Vivian, like all well-written unlikeable narrators (fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Halle Butler, and Lauren Oyler will find much to love here) is often delightfully obnoxious, so enthralled by her performative and privileged social circle she fails to notice the harsh reality that exists just beyond its borders. But what is most impressive about the novella, aside from the expertly-chosen cultural references and the sharp, pithy turns of phrase, is that Drummond's portrait of her protagonist is still so fully fleshed out, rich with glimmers of perception. "I'm filled with a sense of grandeur", Vivian muses at one point, 'the beauty of being part of something bigger, even if that something is rotten".

A perfect, absurd, magnetic satire - reading Role Play feels like scrolling through a curated Instagram page on the cracked screen of a cellphone; like swiping a finger across something shiny, only to later find little splinters of glass buried just beneath the skin.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this free ARC!

Role Play fits an impressive amount of story into relatively few pages and we are immediately dropped into Vivian’s privileged world in Rio de Janeiro. The writing is sharp and energetic. Vivian is a fascinating, terrifying, and hilarious narrator - I was following her every word.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. This short novel dissects the rich as they live and party, both to excess, in Rio de Janeiro. After setting the current stage of characters, Vivian, our guide, takes us back to the history of her own hotel owning family and their always tenuous foothold in society. Vivian, after early traumas that led to a time in a mental health facility, wants us to believe that she is just watching her city, but a violent crime that happens on the street where she lives, to a woman who sells beer in a stall in the street, seems to cause cracks in Vivian’s cool interior, as she doesn’t know if she should get involved.

I first encountered Clara Drummond when an excerpt from ROLE PLAY was published by Astra Magazine. I was immediately hooked by the voice, the humor, the decadence depicted, but not without intention--it's never decadent for decadence's sake. Rather, our narrator seems to learn a lesson. This first comes in her being witness to police violence. Then, as the story continues, we're plunged further into her monied circles, each vignette scratching away at her psyche, everything slowly unfolding. It's a delicious read. Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley!