Skin
Skin is the border of our body and, as such, it is that through which we relate to others but also what separates us from them. Through skin, we speak: when we display it, when we tan it, when we tattoo it, or when we mute it by covering it with clothes. Skin exhibits social relationships, displays power and the effects of power, explains many things about who we are, how others perceive us and how we exist in the world. And when it gets sick, it turns us into monsters.
In Skin, Sergio del Molino speaks of these monsters in history and literature, whose lives have been tormented by bad skin: Stalin secretly taking a bath in his dacha, Pablo Escobar getting up late and shutting himself in the shower, Cyndi Lauper performing a commercial for a medicine promising relief from skin disease, John Updike sunburned in the Caribbean, Nabokov writing to his wife from exile, 'Everything would be fine, if it weren't for the damned skin.' As a psoriasis sufferer, Sergio del Molino includes himself in this gallery of monsters through whose stories he delves into the mysteries of skin. What is for some a badge of pride and for others a source of anguish and shame, skin speaks of us and for us when we don't speak with words.
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'Cogent and insightful'
The Guardian
'Deeply moving... Del Molino writes with a soft touch, and his political, literary and cultural world is richly resonant throughout.'
The Spectator
'Compelling... While he sometimes wishes he were invisible, del Molino bares his own skin in this reflective, sometimes digressive, beautifully written book.'
The Sydney Morning Herald
'Sergio del Molino's beautifully written account of skin and its complications is the starting point for a profound reflection on human imperfection and how we deal with it. Drawing on personal experience, while always striving for social and political meaning, it ranks among the best books I've ever read.'
Andreas Hess, University College Dublin
'When you pick up this book you must realise one thing: The book is written so masterfully that you won't read it, rather you will scratch, pick and obsess your way through it. Skin is memorable because you live every character and experience in it through your body's own reactions of discomfort, self-consciousness and transient relief.'
Nina Jablonski, Pennsylvania State University
'A beautifully written book. It is as raw, lyrical and paradoxical as our most human organ. Sergio del Molino has a rare skill in using our outer surface to express the richness of the human condition.'
Monty Lyman, University of Oxford
'Brave, naked, touching. A work of stark and ravishing lucidity. Epic.'
Irene Vallejo, author of Infinity in a Reed
'An elegantly written work informed by history, psychology, philosophy and sociology, Sergio del Molino's book is in the main a humane, sensitive and insightful study of the disorders to which our human skin is prey.'
Society
