Lost Memory of Skin (2011) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Characters/People edit see section history

• The Kid: Add a description of this character.
• The Professor
• Gloria
• The Writer
• Iggy: The Kid's pet iguana
• Rabbit
• Shyster, Lawrence Somerset: Disgraced state senator who lives under the causeway.
• Paco
• Plato the Greek
• Ginger
• Froot Loop
• P.C.
• Annie
• Einstein
• Dolores Driscoll
• Kydd
• Brandi
• Dario
• Benbow
• Adam
• Yvonne
• Bob
• O. J. Simpson
• Haystack
• Larry
• Chris
• Tony Perez
• Jason

Quotes edit see section history

• “"If everything is a lie, nothing is. Just as, if everything is true, nothing is. That's the story The Professor tells himself."”

  The Narrator

• “"It's only a problem if you rely on logic. That's my point. What you've got to do , Kid, is forget logic, admit its limitations, suspend your disbelief, and believe! It's the only way you'll be free to act. Otherwise you're stuck, frozen in disbelief. As good as dead.”

  The Writer

• “"Maybe if he just acts like he has a third dimension whether he's seen by others or not - ... if he acts like a three-dimensional man then maybe, just maybe, he'll turn into one. Isn't that how everyone does it? By acting? ... So the Kid decides to believe the Professor's story. All of it. That's the first move. The rest will follow.”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• When a society commodifies its children by making them into a consumer group, dehumanizing them by converting them into a crucial, locked-in segment of the economy, and then proceeds to eroticize its products in order to sell them, the children gradually come to be perceived by the rest of the community and by the children themselves as sexual objects. And on the ladder of power, where power is construed sexually instead of economically, the children end up at the bottom rung.

  Highlighted by 26 Kindle customers

• What folks cain’t observe, folks cain’t measure at all. And what we observe, we disturb by observing and thus cain’t measure accurately.

  Highlighted by 23 Kindle customers

• He believes that one’s sexual identity is shaped by one’s self-perceived social identity, that pedophilia, rightly understood, is about not sex, but power. More precisely, it’s about one’s personal perception of one’s power.

  Highlighted by 22 Kindle customers

• If everything is a lie, nothing is. Just as, if everything is true, nothing is.

  Highlighted by 19 Kindle customers

• Like a drug addict, he has compartmentalized his life, not simply in order to remain an addict, but so that he can continue to treat his addiction with more of what he’s addicted to without contaminating any other part of his life, public or private, outer or inner.

  Highlighted by 18 Kindle customers

• What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.

  Highlighted by 18 Kindle customers

• The papers have taken to calling them the Bridge People which he thinks makes sense in another way because they are a bridge between what passes for normal human beings and animals.

  Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers

• Secrets and lies, they eat your insides until all you have left is a hard thin skin that covers you like the shell of one of those eggs you poke a little hole in and draw out its eggy contents before you dye it for Easter.

  Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers

• Plus she was somebody to report to. Everybody needs somebody to report to at the end of the day or in the morning when you wake.

  Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers

• His life has no single unifying narrative. It has many distinct narratives, each of them internally consistent, with a beginning, middle, and end, but none of them is connected to the other, and for the most part none of them is even aware of the other’s existence.

  Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Calusa County
• Afghanistan
• Alabama
• America
• Great Panzacola Swamp
• Gulf
• Caribbean
• Fort Drum
• Vietnam
• New York
• Calusa Bay
• Ottawa
• Atlantic
• West Calusa Gardens
• Anaconda Island
• Mexico

First Sentence edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Criminality and sociology: Describe this theme.
• Sex Crimes and Offenders

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Russell Banks (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Views criminality and society through a lens of sex offenders.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary

Books Cited by This Book edit see section history