Infrared

After a childhood marked by pain, Rena Greenblatt has found the strength to build a successful career as a photographer. Like the ultrasensitive infrared film she uses, Rena sees what others don’t see, and finds a form of love. By photographing men’s bodies, she hopes to glimpse their souls.

Away from her lover, Aziz, stuck in Florence with her infuriating stepmother and her ageing, 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 travelling into dark and passionate memories that will lead her to a series of disturbing revelations.

With exceptional flair and talent, Nancy Huston explores the links between family intimacies and our collective lives, between destruction and creation. In the spirit of her bestselling novel Fault Lines, Infrared is a story about how childhood, family, and our culture all have a direct impact on our sexuality.

Extract

Rena is slanting to the right, slowly sinking farther and farther to the right on the red leather seat of the coffee shop, gradually collapsing against Ingrid’s corpulent maternal body. They’ve been up all night, and it’s been a long night indeed. Ingrid puts an arm around her and in the dawn’s uncertain light it would be difficult to say which of the two women is hanging onto the other. Though her eyes are closed, Rena is not asleep—far from it. She’s conscious of the smells of bleach and frothy milk, the bitter taste of tobacco in her throat, the soft touch of Ingrid’s blouse against her cheek, all the reassuring noises in the café—spoons clinking, doors opening and shutting, to say nothing of the numerous overlapping voices, businessmen in a hurry to down a last ristretto before boarding the train for Rome, a drunkard ordering his first beer of the day, loudspeaker announcements about arrivals and departures, the chatter of waitresses. I sink therefore I am, Rena says to herself, or rather, I’m sinking towards the right therefore I am in Italy, in italics, all my thoughts are in italics, insisting, repeating, recriminating, accusing, screaming at me, “How is it possible? You claim to be an ultrasensitive film and yet you saw nothing, noticed nothing, detected nothing, guessed at nothing, comprehended nothing?“ No, because—not that, you understand, breast yes skin yes stomach yes bronchia yes mediastinum yes, since 1936 infrared photography has been used in all those areas but not in this one not in this one no, no, not at all.

Praise for Infrared:

‘An intense and sensual novel, in which unapologetic feminism never for a minute excludes the desire for men.’

France Soir

‘There is something eminently subversive in Nancy Huston’s latest novel. A 45-yearold woman dares to talk about her sexuality, her immense desire for men. But even more, Infrared is a staggering expression of the power of art as salvation.’

Voir

‘Nancy Huston is at her best in this portrait of a troubled woman who is simultaneously an ambiguous mother, an insatiable and mature lover, and a daughter distraught at the decline of her father. A snapshot of great depth, and written in a perfectly limpid prose.’

Charlie Hebdo

‘Nancy Huston is in top form writing about individual and collective memories, and she knows better than most how to dramatise family destinies.’

Le Monde des Livres

‘Infrared, written in lyrical slivers and voluptuous prose…is an engaging work.’

Canberra Times