"Olsen's fascinating experiment achieves heft by the accumulation of
personal and collective loss, which makes the nightmarish coda feel
eerily plausible. Together, the elegant and heartbreaking set pieces
prompt deep reflection on the connections between minds and bodies, and
on where both are ultimately headed." --Publishers Weekly (starred)
Skin Elegies uses the metaphor of mind-upload technologies to explore
questions about the relationship of the cellular brain to the
bytes-entity to which it gives rise; memory and our connection to the
idea of pastness; refugeeism (geographical, somatic, temporal,
aesthetic); and where the human might end and something else begin.
At the center stands an American couple who have fled their increasingly
repressive country, now under the authoritarian rule of the Reformation
Government, by transferring to a quantum computer housed in North
Africa. The novel's structure mimics a constellation of firing
neurons--a sparking collage of many tiny narraticules flickering through
the brain of one of the refugees as it is digitized. Those narraticules
comprise nine larger stories over the course of the novel: the Fukushima
disaster; the day the Internet was turned on; the final hours of the
Battle of Berlin; John Lennon's murder; an assisted suicide in
Switzerland; the Columbine massacre; a woman killed by a domestic
abuser; a Syrian boy making his way to Berlin; and the Challenger
disaster.
With his characteristic brilliance and unrivaled uniqueness, Lance Olsen
delivers an innovative, speculative, literary novel in the key of
Margaret Atwood, Stanislaw Lem, and J.G. Ballard.
