Red Haze - Softcover

Gailly, Christian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803271123 ISBN 13: 9780803271128

Publisher: Bison Books, 2005

Synopsis

"One day unlike the others, he’ll run into a husband worse than the others, he’ll run into trouble. I often thought this. Well, I was wrong, it was a woman he ran into, a woman worse than the others, here’s what happened." What happened is the shocking tale told deftly by the brilliant French minimalist Christian Gailly in Red Haze. It is a story at once spare and mysteriously complex, complicated by the ever odder perspective of the narrator as the details accumulate. Lucien, the narrator’s friend, is a rake, a womanizer who womanizes once too often and loses his offending member to his latest conquest. As the narrator’s interest in the mutilated man and the vengeful woman grows into an obsession, Red Haze becomes an unsettling story of how closely intertwined love and hatred, passion and cruelty can be. Winner of the prestigious Prix France Culture, Red Haze is the third of Christian Gailly’s ten novels to be published in English. The first, The Passion of Martin Fissel-Brandt, is also published by the University of Nebraska Press.

About this title

About the Author

Brian Evenson is an associate professor in the creative writing program at Brown University. He is the author of Altmann's Tongue (available in a Bison Books edition) and The Wavering Knife, and the translator of Jacques Jouet's Mountain R. David Beus is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of international cultural studies at Brigham Young University, Hawaii and has translated work by Ludovic Janvier, Eduoard Maunick, and others.

From Publishers Weekly

After invoking Nabokov in an epigraph, Gailly (The Passion of Martin Fissel-Brandt) introduces a thoroughly unsympathetic, Humbert-like narrator in this clever little novel about obsession and envy. Recently cured stutterer and unemployed biologist Sylvère Fonda commiserates with Lucien ("not my friend, just an experiment in hatred"), a Lovelace-like figure who has had his penis bitten off by Rebecca Lodge moments after he raped and threatened to kill her. Too diminished and depressed to do anything himself, Lucien convinces Sylvère to travel to Denmark, find Rebecca and speak with her on his behalf; Sylvère does go, but out of curiosity and spite. Once there, however, Sylvère finds himself falling in love with the utterly unavailable Rebecca, a self-assured widow of a handsome naval officer. The third of Gailly's 10 novels to be published in English, this mordant book won France's Prix France Culture. It shares Nabokov's love of doubling, sly clues and base emotions and motivations, but doesn't quite manage his delicious despicability; even after a final, deadly confrontation with Lucien, Sylvère remains a bundle of repetitive affects and affectations rather than a full-blown character. (Sept.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0803271123
• ISBN 13: 9780803271128
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 120