The Skin of the Sky
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Skin of the Sky is the fascinating and haunting story of the life of Lorenzo de Tena, a brilliant Mexican astronomer. Born in the 1930s, the illegitimate son of a businessman and a peasant woman, Lorenzo lives happily with his mother, brothers, and sisters on their mother's farm on a small plot of land outside Mexico City. When Lorenzo's mother dies, his father brings the children to live with him in the capital. Thrust into a privileged world, the children struggle to adjust, and an angry Lorenzo turns to the study of the stars to find solace. He pursues his studies at Harvard, then returns to Mexico, where he attempts to do first-world scientific research in a third-world country. A complex and contradictory man, Lorenzo strives to make his country a better place for all her people, especially the very poor and disenfranchised.
Setting traditional beliefs against technological progress, and personal sacrifice against professional achievement, The Skin of the Sky details the efforts of a country to join the twenty-first century, and paints the portrait of a lonely man who can find true contentment and satisfaction only in the stars.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A gifted Mexican astronomer faces conflicting loyalties in Poniatowska's latest novel (after Here's to You, Jesusa!). Lorenzo de Tena is introduced as a boy living an idyllic life on a farm outside Mexico City with his mother, Florencia, and four siblings. Lorenzo's father is a "well-ironed dandy who showed up on Sundays," but Florencia is a living textbook, teaching the children about pasteurization and the Wright Brothers and encouraging in Lorenzo a lifelong passion for the stars. Lorenzo, a loner, finds the sky his greatest solace, which Poniatowska never lets the reader forget. The stars are the first of Lorenzo's intense loyalties, which leads him to Harvard; loyalty to his mentor, Luis Enrique Erro, causes him to return to Mexico. But the most defining and complicated loyalty is to Mexico itself, and Lorenzo's belief that Mexican scientific advancement will bring the country to an equal standing with America. For this he sacrifices his family, his friends, his personal life. And for this, Poniatowska sacrifices some of the flow of the book, allowing it to get bogged down in names, places and scientific developments. The novel is challenging, not only because it offers an unforgiving protagonist ambitious, solitary and sometimes alienating to the reader but also because it almost exceeds the grasp of its writer.
