PROSOPAGNOSIA

A narratively ambitious reflection on art, beauty, motherhood, and identity by Spanish novelist Hernández.

Fifteen-year-old Berta believes she is destined to bear witness to life’s ugliness, even thinking her friend’s illness is part of her own suffering. After learning in school about prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognize faces, she and her friends Mario and Lucas play a game in which they stare into a mirror and hold their breath until one of them no longer recognizes themself or the others give up or faint. One day, Berta stops breathing as she stares at a painting that's leaning against the wall in the entryway at school and begins to faint. Luckily, before she can hit her head, she's caught by the mysterious man who made the painting. The painter, who claims to be the exiled Mexican artist Vicente Rojo, insists on giving the artwork to Berta. Berta’s mother, a former journalist for the regional newspaper, sees this meeting as an opportunity to restart her career and insists on interviewing the artist. The book is written in two parts, “Prosopagnosia” and “The Man Who Thought He Was Vicente Rojo.” In "Prosopagnosia," Berta’s mother, the narrator, shifts back and forth between third and first person, blurring her thoughts and reality, which is disorienting. At one point she admits, “Now, in my mind, I confuse what I thought during the interview with what the artist said, the notes I took, and what I thought upon reflection afterwards.” “The Man Who Thought He Was Vicente Rojo” feels like a rewrite of “Prosopagnosia.” Berta’s mother fills in gaps from earlier as she recounts her start as a journalist, desire for recognition, and events leading to the interview’s completion with the clarity “Prosopagnosia” lacked. Like both the artist who claims to be Vicente Rojo and her daughter, who stares at herself until she cannot recognize herself, Berta’s mother wants to be someone she’s not.

A conceptually fascinating book.