A Review of Cold Skin by Albert Sanchez Pinol

The new weather official arrives at his Antarctic island outpost only to find that the man he should be replacing is nowhere to be found. His only company is the Austrian lighthouse-keeper, who seems to have gone insane. What has happened? When night falls upon the island, the answer becomes horribly clear.

Cold Skin begins in the mode of a particularly well written gothic fantasy or “weird tale”—but instead of dedicating the slim novel to the slow unveiling of an indescribable horror/unnamable evil/unpronounceable eldritch fiend, Piñol gives us most of the answers we think we want within the first thirty pages, then steers us into deeper waters. The ultimate destination is an uncharted fictional territory somewhere between H. P. Lovecraft and J. M. Coetzee.

Immediately, the desolation of the setting warns us that we’re in for a bit of allegory. Two men, one island, no escape… it’s the classic laboratory of fiction. All the details that would locate and limit the action have been pared away: the island itself is unnamed, we don’t know what year it is, and our anonymous narrator, the weather official, is weirdly blank. An Everyman cipher, he’s literally and figuratively a man without a country—figuratively, in that he feels betrayed by the politics of the nation he’s left behind; literally, in that he never tells us where he’s from. We’re never even told what language he’s speaking to the Austrian in the lighthouse, except that it probably isn’t German (or Catalan, for that matter, the Iberian tongue the novel was actually written in).

The subtext, as it plays out, does seem a little simplistic at first. In addition to the cold-blooded (and -skinned) alien enemy that crawls onto the beach that first night, the narrator must contend with the second, internal threat of his paranoid neighbor, whose perversity deepens abysmally as the novel unfolds. The Serlingian irony of their situation will seem familiar to any reader who owns a TV set (“Huh! It makes ya wonder who the real monsters are!”), but the neat lesson we find ourselves set up for—about Violence and Colonialism and so forth—is complicated and universalized by a much more affecting story, about lowercase-i idealism, so that even if the plot arrives at a conclusion we might have predicted, it has become strange enough in the telling that its emotional impact is undiminished.

More important than all of...