The Face of Another - Softcover

Abe, Kobo (Author); Saunders, E. Dale (Translator)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140034943 ISBN 13: 9780140034943

Publisher: Penguin, 1972

Synopsis

The Japanese novelist Kobo Abe has often been compared to Kafka and this 1966 novel suggests an elegantly chilling postscript to The Metamorphosis. Abe's narrator is a scientist who has been hideously deformed in a laboratory accident, a man who has lost his face in a society where "losing face" is a synonym for humiliation. Alienated from his fellows, sexually rejected by his wife, the injured man painstakingly sets out to create a mask so perfect as to be undetectable. Yet once he achieves his goal, he realizes that he has not fashioned a disguise, but an alternate self -- a self that is capable of anything. The Face of Another is an intellectual horror story of the highest order.

About this title

Review:

"A fascinating book.... The world of Kobo Abe is one in which intellectual concepts have the emotional impact and motivating power of psychotic compulsions."-"Newsweek" "A major novel... Since The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe's stock as a novelist has been very high. The Face of Another raises it still more."-"The Christian Science Monitor ""Probes the edges of a waking nightmare....The central, shaping metaphor of face and facelessness is brilliant, and Abe's relentless pursuit of its every implication is powerful."-"The Saturday Review"

About the Author:

Kobo Abe was born in Tokyo in 1924, grew up in Manchuria, and returned to Japan in his early twenties. Before his death in 1993, Abe was considered his country's foremost living novelist. His novels have earned many literary awards and prizes, and have all been bestsellers in Japan. They include THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES, THE ARK SAKURA, THE FACE OF ANOTHER, THE BOX MAN, and THE RUINED MAP.

Kaori Nagai graduated from the University of Tokyo and obtained a doctorate in Postcolonial Studies from the University of Kent, UK, where she currently teaches. She is the author of Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (forthcoming: Cork University Press).

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1972
• ISBN 10: 0140034943
• ISBN 13: 9780140034943
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224