In Faces, Souls, and Painted Crows, Paul Reiter is a well-known plastic surgeon in Hollywood who tries with some success to juggle his professional world with his calling in a completely different sort of world -- as a healer in a Mexican coastal village. The novel is richly detailed in describing Reiter's rise and concurrent disdain for his profession, as well as the moral and spiritual choices he makes (and forces himself to make) -- the larger issues and concerns that haunt him.
Although told in a disarmingly direct manner, the book hints at epic drama as we follow Reiter from his own humble beginnings in Italy's coal mines to illegal immigrant on the run in America to learning the lifestyle and needs of the people in Puertocitos on the Baja California coast, to an emotionally debilitating extra-marital wandering later in life. The latter is a pivotal event in the novel and sets Reiter on a quest to find a greater meaning behind his own soul as well as the faces and souls who populate the book's world.
During the course of the novel, Reiter, who is a thinly fictionalized version of the author, opens his heart with great difficulty to the people of Puertocitos. As his wife and children suffer through the craziness of marital strife, Reiter grows increasingly despondent and lost in his search for life's meaning. Eventually, he overcomes playing the role of enigmatic White Doctor figure and finally the doctor opens up -- haltingly, at first -- to his patients who from that point on are consistently able to "read" him and comment on his ongoing guilt and desperation. They say he is no angel but also that no man is an island, so learn to accept and to love anyway.
Reiter grows to understand the villagers more completely than he does his own soul. Whereas he is somehow torn between two worlds when the story begins, by the final page he is better equipped to recognize life's meaning more clearly, and providing universally understood insight into how one's choices in life form its meaning. In this case, Reiter accepts himself anyway that he is all of the above - the fast-paced Hollywood plastic surgeon, the loving father and husband (as it turns out), the caring but grim and determined medico of Puertocitos, and a man open to examining his own self-doubts and motivations. And we learn his half-buried reasons for threatening his marriage so destructively.
These reasons are unearthed in heart-rending moments that make this a compelling page-turner. Unterthiner is a master of compiling seemingly unrelated flashbacks and flash-forwards, and then building them to emotional moments that are at times devastating.
For example, early in the novel Reiter's small plane, which he uses to shuttle between Beverly Hills and Puertocitos, Mexico, is grounded, caught in a nasty storm that forces him to put down in a tattered village where a woman is having difficulty giving birth. What follows is a routine medical event in which an emergency situation is avoided but Reiter's interior commentary reveals powerful feelings of inadequacy and doubt. In a lightning-strikes-almost-twice scenario later in the book, Reiter is confronted with his own wife's possible miscarriage, a situation that intensifies his search for high moral ground in his life.
In these scenes and subsequent moments, the straightforward writing asserts itself in force -- we are offered a kaleidoscope of emotions in Reiter's growing obsession with his one-night stand with a Puertocitos siren, as well as contrasting episodes among the inhabitants of Puertocitos and the hoi polloi of Hollywood. Unterthiner's frequent flashbacks reveal a character whose past is both romantically nostalgic (such as his first encounters with his soon-to-be wife) and heartbreaking, suspenseful or horrifying (such as a flashback to Reiter's internship at a terrible Montana state hospital housing a dungeon ward for hopelessly ill children).
Unterthiner's technique dovetails nicely with later dilemmas involving the possible death of a turtle on the Baja beach, unforseen repercussions of his infidelities, and a poignant episode with a major Hollywood star who is even more vulnerable and fragile than Reiter. All of these moments build to a denouement that resolves the doctor's struggle with guilt and his indiscretion - it is his betrayed Native American wife who teaches him the power of forgiveness and the real connection between faces and souls.
--Jeffrey Frentzen
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Le recensioni migliori da altri paesi
Jeffrey Frentzen
Beautifully written, epic tale with a heart
Recensito negli Stati Uniti il 21 marzo 2010Jeremy_in_Calgary
Couldn't put it down
Recensito negli Stati Uniti il 7 settembre 2010Nancy K
Brilliant Author! Unforgettable Story! Riveting!
Recensito negli Stati Uniti il 9 febbraio 2011
Imios Archangelis
Transcending external and internal beauty
Recensito negli Stati Uniti il 11 luglio 2011