Face — Cecile Pineda

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