Cold Skin: A Novel - Hardcover

Sanchez Pinol, Albert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374182396 ISBN 13: 9780374182397

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

On the edge of the Antarctic Circle, in the years after World War One, a steam ship approaches a desolate island far from all shipping lanes. On board is a young man, on his way to assume the lonely post of weather observer, to live in solitude for a year at the end of the world.

But on shore he finds no trace of the man whom he has been sent to replace, just a deranged castaway who has witnessed a horror he refuses to name. The rest is woods, a deserted cabin, rocks, silence, and the surrounding sea. And then night begins to fall . . .

Albert Sanchez-Pinol's Cold Skin is one of the strangest, most unsettling novels you will read this year, a tour de force full of dark resonance and sexual anxiety.

About this title

About the Author:

Albert Sánchez-Pinol is an anthropologist. Cold Skin has been translated into fifteen languages.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this grim, H.G. Wellsian fable, an unnamed European of unspecified nationality is hired to spend an unspecified mid-20th-century year logging wind conditions on a tiny Antarctic island. Anticipating solitude, the bookish young man soon discovers that he has a neighbor—the pathologically reclusive Gruner—and that each night, the island is overrun by humanoid killer amphibians. He and brutish Gruner—who has tamed a "toad" of his own—join forces, killing monsters by night and fornicating with Gruner's pet by day. Inspired by the creature's ability to laugh and cry—to say nothing of her perky breasts, knack for housework and wordless submissiveness—the narrator begins to think of the cold-blooded creatures as human. When he tries to befriend them and their children, his efforts pacify the humanoids, but not Gruner; the hopeful idyll ends when the older man launches a last suicidal effort to exterminate the "monsters." Gruner's death plunges our hero into a rut of battle, drunkenness and bestiality so complete that when his replacement arrives, he has become as feral as Gruner was before him. Sentence by elegant sentence, Piñol's first novel offers a tightly crafted allegory of human brutality both fascinating and repellent. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0374182396
• ISBN 13: 9780374182397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192