Like I said, no one has to tell you everything about himself. And no one’s obliged to tell you the truth about himself either. We all have our little secrets, no? And we all tell little lies, sometimes for innocent reasons. To make friends, for instance, or to avoid embarrassment. Or just to keep things simple. Sometimes the truth is too complicated to pass along in a short conversation or interview. And sometimes it’s just irrelevant.
– Russell Banks
Russell Banks wrote Lost Memory of Skin in 2011. It’s a big novel about the vicissitudes of a lonesome adolescent called the Kid, who falls victim to the perfidious moral machinations of the American legal system, that drives (alleged) pedophiles away from society for life. The Dutch translation was given the stripped-down title Huid (Skin), which goes to show that it’s also possible to keep things simple in less relevant ways.
One of the nicest things that surfaced when I was translating LMoS was the second coming of maternal Dolores Driscoll, who in 1991 was at the wheel of the ill-fated schoolbus in Banks’s impressive novel The Sweet Hereafter. The disastrous road accident isn’t discussed here, but it’s subtly hinted at – sometimes by the narrator, sometimes by a word or gesture of Dolores. Catastrophes will accompany you for the rest of your life, is what Banks is pointing out, ‘starting anew’ is rubbish. Dolores met Cat, a Vietnam veteran – he’s at the receiving end of the above little speech – and together they run a small store-cum-boat rental deep in the Everglades.
Banks gave a contented little smile when I reported my discovery, and he admitted that he wanted to give her a second chance and brought her to Florida. If he wants to, the Kid is in good hands with her.
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Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin, 2011. The Sweet Hereafter, 1991.
In the 2nd still you can see part of the concrete ‘island’ under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, one of the highway fly-overs between Miami and South Beach, and an important location in Lost Memory of Skin. Banks’s fiction is right on top of reality – until shortly before I took the photo this was just about the only place in the Miami area where sex offenders could ‘live’, due to the rule that they keep half a mile distance between themselves and any place that might hold minors.
Read this post in Dutch here.
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