What do you think?
Rate this book
Red Haze
"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.
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.
120 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
35 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 17, 2007
All cats have green eyes.The epigraph is mysterious and attributed to Nabokov but I don't know what it has to do with this short, slight, wispy but appealing novel. Appealing? Well, there is much sarcasm in the narrator's throat and that appeals to me. My cat has blue eyes. Is that what the epigraph is meant to do? To indicate that this narrator is so honestly unreliable that he'll begin his tale with an out and out lie? Perhaps. Perhaps I shouldn't put so much stock in an epigraph. Perhaps I wouldn't if it hadn't been put under Nabokov's pen. If only he'd written the rest of it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review