Book description
Billed as an alphabet, and narrated by the nameless 'N',
Red
introduces us first to N's friend, Zach. In St Petersburg for a music
festival, Zach encounters the red-headed Aline in the Matisse Room at
the Hermitage and is immediately bewitched. The two fall in love as
quickly as they fall into bed and it seems that nothing can keep them
apart. But other characters also appear between the sheets: a gang of
five black-shorted, grease-smeared, soot-smudged men, who take what they
want, stealing money (and, on one occasion, a piece of art) from homes
of the rich; a girl who tends pigs, and wants to keep what is hers; a
workman whose wants are few, but with devastating consequences. Even
aspects of N's own life are revealed: his awkward relationships with his
teenage daughter and her American mother. As these stories overlap and
entwine, Red
is revealed as a vibrant, violent tale: a love story and a story about
the love of art, about life imitating art, about the end of love -- and
the end of life.
'A trio of colour-coded stories . . . Red's
architecture brings with it an associative, encyclopaedic logic, a
familiar way of organizing information whereby these disparate stories,
digressions and fragments of theory draw together to inform the
narratives; its structure spreads out the histories and movements of its
characters through the alphabet' TLS
I. Allan Sealy is the award-winning author of four novels, The Trotter-nama
, for which he received a Commonwealth Writers Prize, Hero
, The Everest Hotel
and The Brainfever Bird
, as well as a travel book, From Yukon to Yucatán
. He lives in the foothills of the Himalayas.
