Infrared
Nancy Huston
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: 080212027X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
After a troubled childhood and two failed marriages, Rena Greenblatt has achieved success as a photographer. She specializes in infrared techniques that expose her pictures’ otherwise hidden landscapes and capture the raw essence of deeply private moments in the lives of her subjects.
Away from her lover, and stuck in Florence, Italy, with her infuriating stepmother and her aging, unwell father, Rena confronts not only the masterpieces of the Renaissance but the banal inconveniences of a family holiday. At the same time, she finds herself traveling into dark and passionate memories that will lead to disturbing revelations.
Infrared is both an explicitly bold story of how sexuality is influenced by childhood, family, and culture, and a portrait of a woman coming to terms with the end of her father’s life. With exceptional flair and intelligence, Huston fearlessly investigates the links between family intimacies and our collective lives, between destruction and creation.
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snack. ‘Really, Aicha, we can dispense with oranges…’ ‘Out of the question…’ So, as we drove to the baths (yes, yes, she has her licence), she stopped in front of a fruit stand. I saw her hesitate, make as if to get out of the car, then decide against it. ‘Is something wrong?’ I asked. Aicha told me she couldn’t purchase the oranges herself because there was ‘a whole tableful of Arabs’ on the café terrace across from the fruit stand. I was floored. ‘She’s a widow,’ Aziz explained to me later,
apart and bent at the knees… ‘It almost looks like a woman giving birth, doesn’t it, Dad?’ says Ingrid. ‘Yeah, except that they’re men’s legs,’ Simon points out. ‘Don’t you want to take a photo, Rena?’ ‘I don’t photograph weird things.’ Oh, I see, says Subra, again imitating Ingrid’s voice, you don’t photograph weird things. Three hundred and fifty Whore Sons and Daughters—there’s nothing weird about that, of course. Mafiosi, hooligans, traders, sleeping nudes—just your
to photograph. ‘Here, at least, we can go out in the morning, walk around, chat together, do a bit of shopping…In other neighbourhoods there are ten-year-old girls locked up in cages.’ After one of these conversations, Rena had gone back to her hotel feeling suicidal. The next day, rising early, she’d walked all the way up Malabar Hill to the Hanging Gardens and been revived by their beauty. And today, even as she moves with excruciating slowness through the streets of Florence, she is
a lengthy queue at the booth. As Simon and Rena settle in for a wait, Ingrid wanders into the courtyard to look at the cloister. But can she really see it? Rena wonders. Can she feel the beauty of this place? Does she know how to marvel at buildings that date back six hundred years? I do, don’t I, oh, yes, I do, no doubt about it…Oh, Aziz, it’s only the first day and already I’m floundering, sliding towards hysteria…You told me I was armed to the teeth—was it really only this morning you
Syracuse… ‘I’m not so sure,’ her father says. ‘Where are the figs?’ ‘It’s not the right time of year,’ says Rena. ‘Yes, it is,’ he objects. (Touché!) ‘Maybe Jesus struck it down in a fit of rage,’ he goes on. ‘You know, there’s that strange passage in Saint Matthew where…’ ‘Yes, I know,’ she says, cutting him off. ‘I know.’ What else? Fig tree, fig tree…(When did this hateful rivalry between them begin?) ‘In Italian,’ she says, ‘the equivalent of “I don’t give a damn” is “Non