Under the Skin - Hardcover

Faber, Michel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151006261 ISBN 13: 9780151006267

Publisher: Harcourt, Inc., 2000

Synopsis

Isserley picks up hitchhikers with big muscles. She, herself, is tiny-like a kid peering up over the steering wheel. She has a remarkable face and wears the thickest corrective lenses anyone has ever seen. Her posture is suggestive of some spinal problem. Her breasts are perfect; perhaps implants. She is strangely erotic yet somehow grotesque, vulnerable yet threatening. Her hitchhikers are a mixed bunch of men-trailer trash and travelling postgrads, thugs and philosophers. But Isserley is only interested in whether they have families and whether they have muscles. Then, it's only a question of how long she can endure her pain-physical and spiritual-and their conversation. Michel Faber's work has been described as a combination of Roald Dahl and Franz Kafka, as Somerset Maugham shacking up with Ian McEwan. At once humane and horrifying, Under the Skin takes us on a heart-thumping ride through dangerous territory-our own moral instincts and the boundaries of compassion. A grotesque and comical allegory announcing the arrival of an exciting talent, rich and assured.

About this title

Review:

In the opening pages of Under the Skin, a lone female is scouting the Scottish Highlands in search of well-proportioned men: "Isserley always drove straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her." At this point, the reader might be forgiven for anticipating some run-of-the-mill psychosexual drama. But commonplace expectation is no help when it comes to Michel Faber's strange and unsettling first novel; small details, then major clues, suggest that something deeply bizarre is afoot. What are the reasons for Isserley's extensive surgical scarring, her thick glasses, her excruciating backache? Who are the solitary few who work on the farm where her cottage is located? And why are they all nervous about the arrival of someone called Amlis Vess?

The ensuing narrative is of such cumulative, compelling strangeness that it almost defies description. The one thing that can be said with certainty is that Under the Skin is unlike anything else you have ever read. Faber's control of his medium is nearly flawless. Applying the rules of psychological realism to a fictional world that is both terrifying and unearthly, he nonetheless compels the reader's absolute identification with Isserley. Not even the author's fine short-story collection, Some Rain Must Fall, prepared us for such mastery. Under the Skin is ultimately a reviewer's nightmare and a reader's dream: a book so distinctive, so elegantly written, and so original that one can only urge everybody in earshot to experience it, and soon. --Burhan Tufail

From the Back Cover:

Now a Major Motion Picture "Alternately gorgeous and terrifying, lyrical and brutal, "Under the Skin "compels and teases . . . Satisfying and successful." "Newsday"In this haunting, entrancing novel, Michel Faber introduces us to Isserley, a female driver who cruises the Scottish Highlands picking up hitchhikers. Scarred and awkward, yet strangely erotic and threatening, she listens to her hitchhikers as they open up to her, revealing clues about who might miss them if they should disappear. A grotesque and comical allegory, "Under the Skin" takes us on a heart-thumping ride through dangerous territory our own moral instincts and the boundaries of compassion to present a surreal representation of contemporary society run amok."A wonderful book painful, lyrical, frightening, brilliant . . . I couldn t put it down." Kate Atkinson, author of "Life After Life"Finalist for the Whitbread AwardMichel Faber is the author of "The Crimson Petal and the White, The Courage Consort, "and "Some Rain Must Fall." His work has been published in twenty countries and received several literary awards. He lives in Scotland.
"

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt, Inc.
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0151006261
• ISBN 13: 9780151006267
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 311