Skinned Alive (1995)
“In the same way the Ile Saint-Louis was no longer a place where people lived, shopped for food and worked but rather an ensemble of stately, empty investment flats that stood dark and untenanted eleven months out of twelve, the seventeenth-century façades concealing luxury twentieth-century interiors rarely visited by their owners, who were groups of American or Saudi—well, not even people but corporations. Key West—famous for its decrepitude, Cuban cigar makers, shrimpers and destitute artists—was now glistening with hasty but radical restorations perpetrated by retired tax accountants growing their gray hair long.
No, all that was real in the world was its despised, interchangeable platitudes, the suburban shopping malls, the millions of vernacular miles of California strip architecture or, on a lower level still, the sprawling concrete apartment buildings outside Cairo or Istanbul fissuring and rusting even before completed, open sewers between them seeping through the red mud.
Write Review:
Guest
Read Also
10 / 10
10 / 10
User Reviews: