Cold Skin

An Irishman who has lost his taste for life gets a job as a meteorologist in a navigation company and is sent to a remote Antarctic island. He expects a monotonous existence at the edge of the world, with the lighthouse keeper as his only companion. But already on the first night, ocean creatures crawl out of the sea, and voluntary isolation turns into endless horror. What happens to a person when confronted with the incomprehensible? On the island, two men reach the limit of understanding and discover: a bottomless abyss is behind it.

Albert Sánchez Piñol is an anthropologist and one of the most noticeable, distinctive figures of Catalan prose. He creates worlds where the plausible intertwines with the fantastic, and people, time and again, face the Other—in the spirit of Lovecraft, Conrad, and Stevenson. “Cold Skin,” the writer’s debut novel, became famous in 2002, experienced dozens of reissues in Spain and Catalonia, was translated into 37 languages, and was adapted into a film by Xavier Gens (in Russian release the 2017 film was called “Atlantis”). Night after night, “children of the sea” emerge onto the shore—but who here is truly the stranger: those who come from the ocean darkness, or we, who hide behind the idea of civilization and can’t see the living person in the Other?