Mascara: A Novel

by Ariel Dorfman, J. M. Coetzee (Afterword)

Overview

Mascara delves into the dark terrain of identity and disguise when the lives of three people collide. A nameless man with a face no one remembers has the devastating ability to see and capture on film the brutal truths lurking inside each person he encounters. Oriana, a beautiful woman with the memory of an innocent child, is relentlessly pursued by mysterious figures from her past. Doctor Mavirelli is a brilliant and power-hungry plastic surgeon who controls society’s most prominent figures by shaping their faces. The twining of these three fates plays out in a climactic unmasking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781583226414
Publisher:	Seven Stories Press
Publication date:	07/06/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	5.54(w) x 8.23(h) x 0.33(d)

About the Author

ARIEL DORFMAN is considered to be one of “the greatest Latin American novelists” (Newsweek) and one of the United States’ most important cultural and political voices. Dorfman's numerous works of fiction and nonfiction have been translated into more than thirty languages, including Death and the Maiden, which has been produced in over one hundred countries and made into a film by Roman Polanski. Dorfman has won many international awards, including the Sudamericana Award, the Laurence Olivier, and two from the Kennedy Center. He is distinguished professor at Duke University and lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Editorial Reviews

Taut, eerie … a postmodern version of Jekyll and Hyde.” –The New York Times Book Review

“A marvelously inventive story of suspense … Mascara places Dorfman in the exalted cultural Parnassus inhabited by Franz Kafka and Kobe Abe.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A tantalizingly ambiguous web of deceit, intrigue, and obsession, its layers of meaning gradually revealed … The reader is left in delicious puzzlement.” –Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Chilean exile Dorfman's latest work (after The Last Song of Manuel Sendero ) is a tantalizingly ambiguous web of deceit, intrigue and obsession, its layers of meaning gradually revealed. The first, and longest, part of the book is a paranoic monologue by a nameless man with a face that no one recognizes or remembers. Never lovedeven by his own motherbecause he is so forgettable, he turns his curse to his advantage and spies on others, blackmailing victims with photographs that he takes just when their faces reveal their true natures. His life of carefully constructed obscurity is threatened when he runs his car into that of Dr. Maleverdi, a famous plastic surgeon. Then Oriana, an amnesiac, is left in his keeping and he falls in love with her. But with Oriana, who is being tracked by two shadowy men, he is no longer unnoticed, and he realizes that someone is subverting his entire network of spies and informants. Just when it seems that the narrator is about to reveal the cause of his persecution, the narration switches to another voice, that of Oriana's real mnemonic being, which the narrator has hoped will never surface. A final section is narrated by Maleverdi, who, it turns out, has known of the faceless man since his birth, and has watched over his whole life. ``A Sort of Epilogue'' tantalizingly concludesbut doesn't resolvethe story, and the reader is left in delicious puzzlement. (October)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Most of this exploration of memory and identity in an unnamed city is narrated by someone who remembers all faces but who can never be recognized. Although the book was written in English, its title is more appropriate in its Spanish definition, ``mask''as evidenced by the narrator's confrontation with a plastic surgeon who can make a politician look like an up-and-coming rival. The novel's conception is interesting but, like much of this brilliant Chilean's fiction, fails to sustain the power of his ``poems of disappearance.'' Still, it includes the wonderful tale of a four-and-a-half-year-old who stopped aging after being molested. This story, told by a part of her that secretly kept growing, explaining that people are at birth issued hands used by those who lived before, is first-rate. Ethan Bumas, Fudan Univ., Shanghai

Library Journal