Book Review: Albert Sánchez Piño, Cold Skin

by anna battista

Fans of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies will rejoice reading this novel by anthropologist and novelist Albert Sánchez Piño.

The story is set in the years after World War I on an island in the Antarctic Circle where a man who is trying to forget his past takes up a job as a weather observer. The unnamed narrator of the story is hoping he will be able to spend his life in solitude on the island, but, once he arrives on it, he realises this won’t happen. The man he is supposed to be replacing has disappeared and, in his place, a castaway, Gruner, has taken residence in the island’s lighthouse. Besides, every night, reptilian sea creatures, that Gruner calls “toads”, come to the island to kill its inhabitants. A battle starts between the weather observer and the sea creatures, while at the same time he has a carnal relationship with one of the “toads” Gruner has tamed and enslaved.

There are all the ingredients here for a gothic and slightly Wellsian novel: the elements that make up the plot are quite basic and simple, there are just two men, a lighthouse, an island and many monsters, but Albert Sánchez Piño uses this simple stage to talk about philosophical themes such as the fear of isolation, the struggle for survival and the abomination caused by bestiality and brutality. Cold Skin turns towards the end into a meditation of humanity and an analysis of the dichotomies power/submission, power/corruption, enslavement/humiliation - all themes that Albert Sánchez Piño also examined in his non-fiction volume Payasos y Monstruos.

Albert Sánchez Piño’s Cold Skin is an unsettling surreal drama, with an allegorical meaning behind its “monster-plagued inferno.” It is a book that will have you shouting “Oh the horror, the horror!” when you reach its last page.

{www.canongate.net}