Prosopagnosia
-
- 10,99 €
-
- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
A sly and playful novel about the many faces we all have.
Fifteen-year-old Berta says that beautiful things aren’t made for her, or that she isn’t destined to have them, or that the only things she deserves are ugly. It’s why her main activity, when she’s not at school, is playing the ‘prosopagnosia game’ — standing in front of the mirror and holding her breath until she can no longer recognise her own face. An ibis is the only animal she wants for a pet.
Berta’s mother is in her forties. By her own estimation, she is at least twenty kilos overweight, and her husband has just left her. Her whole life, she has felt a keen sense of being very near to the end of things. She used to be a cultural critic for a regional newspaper. Now she feels it is her responsibility to make her and her daughter’s lives as happy as possible.
A man who claims to be the famous Mexican artist Vicente Rojo becomes entangled in their lives when he sees Berta faint at school and offers her the gift of a painting. This sets in motion an uncanny game of assumed and ignored identities, where the limits of what one wants and what one can achieve become blurred. Art, culture, motherhood, and the search for meaning all have a part to play in whether Sònia Hernàndez’ characters recognise what they see within.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Hernández's beguiling and uneven English-language debut, a troubled teenage girl and her mother are drawn in by a famous Mexican painter in contemporary Spain. After Berta, 15, faints at her school in front of a painting brought in by a classmate's father who claims to be famous painter Vicente Rojo, the artist walks her home. He thought she was awestruck by the work, but Berta and her friends often play a game called prosopagnosia, for which they hold their breath until their faces distort and change color, becoming unrecognizable to themselves in the mirror. The game holds particular appeal for Berta because it allows her to dissociate from her own face, which she finds ugly. (She feels the same way about the painting.) Her mother, a former journalist who frets about her weight, becomes entranced by the artist after meeting him, and later interviews him, hoping to reboot her career. When Berta's friend Mario gets cancer, Berta has a change of heart and seeks help from the artist to paint a mural in Mario's honor. While the mother's pedestrian insights wear thin ("Imagination isn't only important for artists, but for everyone in their daily lives"), the various characters' deceptions are unveiled skillfully by Hernández as she distorts the reader's sense of reality. This novel is more than it seems, but it can be painful to get through.
