The Skin I Live In

Originally published in French as Mygale (1984), The Skin I Live In is a psychological thriller by the French noir writer Thierry Jonquet, translated into Chinese by Fang Songhua. The story opens on a summer night on the outskirts of Paris: a young man riding a motorcycle alone is rear-ended and knocked down, and when he wakes he finds himself imprisoned in inescapable darkness, tormented by hunger and thirst, with no idea what has happened to him or who the man who pinned him down really is. The second half of the novel shifts to the plastic surgeon Richard Lafargue, whose daughter suffers a breakdown after being assaulted, sending him down a path of revenge that gradually spirals out of control. The book is divided into three parts titled "Spider," "Venom," and "Prey," moving forward through multiple limited perspectives—"I," "he," "she"—and scrambling chronology so that the identities, motives, and hidden connections between captor and captive are revealed little by little. In remarkably few pages it depicts the distorted relationships among control, the body, and identity in a cold, restrained style; it is one of the representative works of French neo-noir crime fiction and the novel on which the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's film of the same name is based.