Face

Nominated for a 1985 American Book Award, this first novel centers on a Brazilian man whose face is horribly disfigured in an accident. Helio Cara loses his job, his mistress, his friends, and then seeks to create a new visage through a grisly form of self-surgery.


"I am deeply impressed by this book, as much by what is not said as by what is said. . . . Pineda is a writer of the utmost artistic integrity."  —J. M. Coetzee, winner, Nobel Prize in Literature


"Pineda transforms our dread fears of disfigurement and ugliness into a plangent epiphany of the human spirit . . . [She] will be compared to Cortazar, Borges, and Marquez. She has breathed the life of drama, the mortality of the novel, and her own special grace into what she found. Cheers!"  —Los Angeles Times Book Review


"Reveals the immense power of human will and obsession . . . an original, complex portrait of survival."  —New York Times Book Review


"A poetic, hallucinatory work, finely and sparely written, the debut of a very talented writer indeed. May we see more?"  —Newsday


"Speaks in the spare voice of man's spirit at its final reach."  —The Tribune (San Diego)


"Pineda's haunted story, with its bold symbolism, will remind readers of Camus and Kafka."  —People