Dorfman, Ariel

New York. 1988. Viking Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket . 0670823147. 158 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Neil Stuart. Type design by Todd Radom. Jacket photography by Thonsas Lindley . keywords: Literature Translated Chile Latin America. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Acclaimed by Newsweek as ‘one of the six greatest living Latin American novelists,' Ariel Dorfman has now written a novel in English. MASCARA is the story of a man born with a face no one remembers, a man who has never been loved because he is not recognizable, who has never loved because he sees in people only their most obscene, most naked, most hidden secrets. One day Oriana comes to his doorstep. She is being pursued; he takes her in. That she has the memory of a five-year-old, has no secrets, makes Oriana the perfect woman. She is the only one he can love, the only soul he wants to protect - from the men who are trying to kill her and from the forgotten woman who might come back to repossess her. For if Oriana awakens from her amnesia, she will become like the others, ‘someone with a past, with a mask, with a piece of lipstick.' Written with inexorable logic, taut and sinister, Mascara is about sexual domination, about power and betrayal, about memory. ‘Memory is always a fraud,' says Oriana's lover, ‘erased, manipulated, sweetened by somebody, somebody always swearing it was some other way, until you are not sure yourself.' As haunting as Kafka's Metamorphosis, Ariel Dorfman's third novel is both a tragic story of doomed love and a call to arms against a world of fabricated personalities and television truths. ‘Who owns this city?' the faceless man asks his enemy and collaborator, the plastic surgeon, Maleverdi. ‘You who disguise people, or I who open the shutters of their pretense?' inventory #27423 ISBN: 0670823147.