Review: 'Face" by Jaspreet Singh

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Face: A Novel of the Anthropocene
By Jaspreet Singh
Literary Fiction 
Touchwood Editions

Mysteries within mysteries, whether scientific, academic or personal, are puzzled over in Jaspreet Singh's novel Face. As the mysteries are revealed, the ways in which they connect demonstrate just how complicated even the simplest-seeming thing can be.

Lila studied geology at university, but left India and became a science journalist. She enrolls in a fiction writing workshop and is paired with a woman in a face-studying exercise. They don't yet know each other's names, but they will get to know each other. And one of them will be dead in 51 days. 

The exercise is not comfortable to Lila, but she continues. And she imagines feeling responsible for this other person, who is named Lucia. Before they have a chance to talk when the exercise ends, a man appears in the classroom door to pick Lucia up. Lila is certain she has seen him before. But how and where is one of the mysteries to be unraveled in the novel.

When Lucia introduces her husband to Lila, she recognizes him as a former classmate of hers. But that cannot be. He died.

Lila's university days are recounted -- the group she studied with, her best friend, the boy her best friend fell in love with, and what happened during a field expedition that went very wrong.

Early on, Lila writes that she enrolled in the workshop because she wanted to "enter a character's consciousness". As the story progresses, the reader learns that Lila is revealing more of her secrets while considering the other mysteries in the story. 

The novella Lila is writing for the workshop attempts to connect two stories that she says do not belong together on the same page, although they are connected in real life. Singh connects those two stories together and brings in far more other stories and ideas. 

Face also has the reader consider such ideas as how caste and colonialism pervade academia and scientific research, and how scientific research founded upon lies works its way into generations of further research. 

Not everything is revealed in the novel. But that's part of the plan. When Lila's writing instructor tells the class that "we are the stories we tell", she notes:

We are also the stories we choose not to tell. In fact, we are more the stories we don't tell, cannot tell, or will never be able to tell.

Throughout the telling of the various stories in Face, the choices about what is revealed, what is not revealed, and when things become known propel the narrative. It's a remarkable exercise in how personal stories can affect the greater natural world, and how that natural world is a part of every person.

The subtitle to Face is A Novel of the Anthropocene, signaling that this is a story of the current geological age. It certainly is a novel about the effect of people on the natural world and on each other.