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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
cold skin, hot feelings, 3 April 2007
Have never written a review here before, but am driven to do so by feeling that most reviews here/on the US site/in the press have partly at least missed the point. Partly, maybe, because in the English edition, I gather, a crucial part of the Spanish text has been cut. (I live on a Spanish island so read it in Spanish.)
So far so simple. Disillusioned Irishman takes job as meterologist on uninhabited antarctic island; finds himself living in a lighthouse besides a brutalised South African and his monster housekeeper/lover, beseiged by the latter's people, humanoid frogs, from the depths of the sea. So far so Poe, so Lovecraft (both addictions once of this reviewer.) But in all the brutality humanity, subtlety intrudes. Pinol, the writer, is Catalan; his characters, Irish, South African, and, briefly at the end, Jewish. All of them, it should be noted people from places where one nation/people is or has been in brutal conflict with another people whom in every case they have tended to demonise. The cut section of the text tells of the main character's struggles in the IRA, the establishment of free Eire, and his disillusionment on discovering that under de Valera the injustices go on. He is someone therefore who understands that the monsters, the humans, exist on both sides; inside us all. This is important.
He and the South African, Batis, fight for their lives against the monsters; using grenades, rifles, eventually dynamite, salvaged from a shipwreck, below the sea. It is during the salvage of this most brutal of all their weapons that humanity surfaces. In a beautiful scene reminiscent of the whale nursery in Moby Dick - the absolute calm and peace below the savagery of the whalers on the surface of the sea - the Irishman encounters the frog nursery; is beseiged by curious tadpoles, touching him, playing with him. And when later after the mass slaughter created by the dynamite, the always unnamed Irishman begins to realise that there have to be other answers, when he listens to the sex slave, housekeeper, at last, understands she has a name, that her people have a name and makes his first conciliatory gesture, what do they do? - they send him their children; whom he plays with delightedly. He even adopts one of them, an orphan, a youngster who clearly reminds him of his own brutalised childhood in an orphanage. 'My triangulo' he calls him.
The South African refuses to understand this change of heart. The horrors continue. He eventually walks to death by monsters. The Irishman misses him, despite his previous loathing; fights, gets drunk, abuses the sex slave, his strongs feeling/love for whom, he the unloved one cannot deal with. His replacement the Jewish boy arrives. All other reviewers suggest that the cycle is about to begin again. Yes, in a way; the Irishman too by now, is almost as brutalised as Batis the South African; he is discovered by his replacement just as Batis first was, dead drunk. But not quite. The last words of the book has the Irishman crying out for his Triangulo, his baby.
Poe and Lovecraft didn't make me weep, the way this almost did. Lovecraft's horrors, his monsters, were always 'nameless.' The naming of the irishmen's monsters is what matters about this book. It's an important one, I think. As well as unputdownable, even to someone forced like me to read with a dictionary to hand.
Incidentally, I looked for Cold Skin first because of a complaint by its publisher that it had sunk without trace in the UK. More fools us, the British. It should be read. And enjoyed. Oh and thought about. Please.
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