Author Khanh Ha: October 2012

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Lost Memory of Skin

In Lost Memory of Skin the Kid isn't like 'the Kid' in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Rather the Kid of Russell Banks is closer to Gene Harrogate in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, a renegade in all the sense of perversion and isolation. It is like taking Gene Harrogate out of Suttree and creating a new life for him in Lost Memory of Skin in modern time.

The main attractions in "Skin" are the Kid and the Professor. The Kid, though anti-social and masturbation-addicted, is as vividly interesting a character as the Professor who is profiled as a T-rex-forever-hungry human being, at times seen as larger-than-life, massive-brooding-persuasive-brilliant for his own good. All the characters who pop up here and there live and breathe like real people. And all of them, including the Kid and the Professor, live a moralless life. It's an everyone-for-himself kind of life.

Albeit the overuse of research materials to validate and authenticate the storyline and its setting around and under a south Florida causeway, "Skin" is a modern literary tour de force.

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Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time or all of the time they could afford it; mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named apéritifs were advertised, but few people could afford them except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.

The Café des Amateurs was the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard, that wonderful narrow crowded market street which led into the Place Contrescarpe. The squat toilets of the old apartment houses, one by the side of the stairs on each floor with two cleated cement shoe-shaped elevations on each side of the aperture so a locataire would not slip, emptied into cesspools which were emptied by pumping into horse-drawn tank wagons at night. In the summer time, with all windows open, you would hear the pumping and the odor was very strong. The tank wagons were painted brown and saffron color and in the moonlight when they worked the rue Cardinal Lemoine their wheeled, horse-drawn cylinders looked like Braque paintings. No one emptied the Café des Amateurs though, and its yellowed poster stating the terms and penalties of the law against public drunkenness was as flyblown and disregarded as its clients were constant and ill-smelling.

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked.

—Ernest Hemingway (A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel)