Prosopagnosia

A sly and playful novel about the many faces we all have. Fifteen-year-old Berta says that beautiful things aren`t made for her, she isn`t destined to have them, the only things she deserves are ugly. It`s why her main activity, when she`s not at school, is playing the `prosopagnosia game` - standing in front of the mirror and holding her breath until she can no longer recognise her own face. Berta`s mother is in her forties. By her own estimation, she is at least twenty kilos overweight, and her husband has just left her. Her whole life, she has felt a keen sense of being very near to the end of things. She used to be a cultural critic for a regional newspaper. Now she feels it is her responsibility to make her and her daughter`s lives as happy as possible. A man who claims to be the famous Mexican artist Vicente Rojo becomes entangled in their lives when he sees Berta faint at school and offers her the gift of a painting. This sets in motion an uncanny game of assumed and ignored identities, where the limits of what one wants and what one can achieve become blurred.