“Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.” —Cornel West
“Of the many writers working in the great tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks.” —New York Times
Lost Memory of Skin is a provocative novel of spiritual and moral redemption from Russell Banks, the author of Affliction, Rule of the Bone, Continental Drift, Cloudsplitter, and other acclaimed masterworks of contemporary American fiction. Uncompromising and complex, Lost Memory of Skin is the story of The Kid, a young sex offender recently released from prison and forced to live beneath a South Florida causeway. When The Professor, a man of enormous intellect and appetite, takes The Kid under his wing, his own startling past will cause upheavals in both of their worlds. At once lyrical, witty, and disturbing, Banks’s extraordinary novel showcases his abilities as a world-class storyteller as well as his incisive understanding of the dangerous contradictions and hypocrisies of modern American society.
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"I picked this one up on a lark, not really knowing the subject matter but going by Banks's earlier works. This novel gets under your skin; it sucks you in as it foreces you to explore to our contemporary US culture's neuroses about sex, technology, morality, 'truth', performing identities, etc. And at the heart of the novel, or in the eye of its recurring real and metaphorical hurricanes, is a twenty-something sex offender called the Kid, the Professor, and the Writer. Through the use of common nouns, Banks names his characters whose escapades seem unlikely yet plausible (i.e., the 'true' identity of the professor poses literal questions about his past, but also questions about how we either believe we are who we are or we don't believe, and how we either believe who others are or don't believe.) But, only one of those characters do you really come to know through the author's compassionate portrait and he is not without hope for redemption."
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Pamela (4 out of 5 stars)