"One day unlike the others, he'll run into a husband worse than the others, he'll run into trouble. I often thought this. Well, I was wrong, it was a woman he ran into, a woman worse than the others, here's what happened."

What happened is the shocking tale told deftly by the brilliant French minimalist Christian Gailly in Red Haze. It is a story at once spare and mysteriously complex, complicated by the ever odder perspective of the narrator as the details accumulate. Lucien, the narrator's friend, is a rake, a womanizer who womanizes once too often and loses his...