Red (Hunger)
Description
About the loneliness of the body and our cannibalistic language of love.
Red (Hunger) is a novel consisting of two stories told in parallel, each desiring the other, which interweave into a single love story. The Story of a Year takes place in 2019: after a separation, a novelist who shares the author's name reflects on his grief and longing in the absence of the person he loves, the person he has lost. The second story, The Story of a Day, is that of the real-life event that came to be known as the Rotenburg cannibalism case. Armin Meiwes and his partner Bernd Brandes had met on the internet: Meiwes was looking for someone to eat, Brandes wanted to be eaten.
Both stories are intertwined, wedged into each other, and refer to each other dialectically; they tell variations of the same story: that the person we desire remains the most absent person of all - because they can never be close enough. Translated from the German, this is a novel for readers of A Lover's Discourse and Monstrilio
More details
Person
Vijay Khurana is a writer and translator based between Berlin and London. His work has appeared in NOON, The Guardian, 3: AM Magazine, The Erotic Review and elsewhere. He is currently completing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Queen Mary, University of London, researching the disembodied voice and its effect on diaspora, long-distance relationships and loneliness. An excerpt from his translation of the German novel Red (Hunger) by Senthuran Varatharajah appears in the 2024 White Review translation anthology. The Passenger Seat, his first novel, was shortlisted for the 2022 Novel Prize.