The Red Bird - John Fraser

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Résumé :
The Red Bird is the latest work of speculative fiction by John Fraser of whom the distinguished poet and Booker Prize nominee John Fuller has recently written: 'I am convinced that he is the most original novelist of our time. His work has become an internal dialogue of intuitions and counter-intuitions that just happens to take the form of conversations between inscrutable characters. But really it is a rich texture of poetic perceptions, frequently reaching for the aphoristic, but rooted in sidelong debate and weird analogies.' In The Red Bird a group of associates, some close, some distant - all habitu?s of a New York pub The Empty Room - decide to leave the States to try an experiment in the Sahel. Prompted by economic and sentimental interests, and by curiosity and ignorance, and having set up a trading post and motel in the desert, their friendships begin to fall dramatically apart in a quest for power, and murder ensues...

Biographie:
and the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think of nothing much like them in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironic distance from the extreme conditions in which his characters find themselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions to rooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives, surreal but somehow apposite social customs.'...

Sommaire:
The Red Bird is the latest work of speculative fiction by John Fraser of whom the distinguished poet and Booker Prize nominee John Fuller has recently written: 'I am convinced that he is the most original novelist of our time. His work has become an internal dialogue of intuitions and counter-intuitions that just happens to take the form of conversations between inscrutable characters. But really it is a rich texture of poetic perceptions, frequently reaching for the aphoristic, but rooted in sidelong debate and weird analogies.' In The Red Bird a group of associates, some close, some distant - all habitu?s of a New York pub The Empty Room - decide to leave the States to try an experiment in the Sahel. Prompted by economic and sentimental interests, and by curiosity and ignorance, and having set up a trading post and motel in the desert, their friendships begin to fall dramatically apart in a quest for power, and murder ensues......