Red Haze - by Christian Gailly (Paperback)

Book 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.

Review Quotes

"Red Haze ultimately succeeds in transcending the nihilism typical of many black comedies. It's not until the final few pages that the humor collapses and fundamental questions of life and death come rushing to the fore. . . . Still, it's hard to rid one's mind of the novel's shifty humor, its clipped and uncertain sentences, its surprising passages of lyricism, its sense of play, its beautiful self-indulgence, all stemming from the narrator's love of language."--Andrew Palmer, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"It's the writing that really propels this increasingly creepy story. . . . This isn't a noir novel, but it's more unsettling than most noir fiction is. Unpredictable (in both what happens and how it is presented), often unpleasant . . . and yet surprisingly successful."--Complete Review

"[A] clever little novel about obsession and envy."--Publishers Weekly

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.