["The Face of Another"] is an intricately contrived fantasy, somewhat wanting in dramatic confrontation of characters, but replete with symbolic devices having to do with the fate of modern man.

The story, told in a series of letters and journal entries, is of a man who, as a result of a laboratory accident, has lost his face behind keloid scars, and who sets about making himself a new one. The process of imagining and producing the new face is an ordeal, the process of trying to put it to use a still greater one. The hero's motives in wishing to have "the face of another" are complex and contradictory, but central to them is a longing to re-establish communication with humanity, of which the loss of a face has deprived him. What he finds is only a companionship of loneliness. (pp. 4-5)

One of the most striking things...