Red (Hunger) - Senthuran Varatharajah;Vijay Khurana

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