I loved This Were Their Faces for its weird melding of reality and surreality. My favorite stories were the ones where I was never sure whether I was reading fantasy or reality. She left me guessing throughout and generally never resolved the mystery even at the end of a story. I found Ocampo to be a great companion Flannery O'Connor, exchanging the southeastern U.S. grotesque for South American supernaturalism, with nearly equal overall darkness.

What this gains as a reference work from its scope and depth in drawing from Ocampo's many collections, it loses somewhat as a cohesive reading experience, as a single book. Or this may be because my copy came from the library, meaning I couldn't leave as much space to breath between stories as they may deserve. In any event she really hit her stride, in content and style, with the collection The Guests, from which the eerie and mysterious title story was drawn. Here, the menace of earlier stories (the vicious little melodramas of The Fury) gains the fateful ambience of the classically weird tale, set into a wider surrealist resonance with the world. I'd actually love to read just The Guests as a since cohesive collection. Instead, we get part of it, with lesser examples of Ocampo's craft stretching before and after (though the stories of The Fury also seem to form a powerful and cohesive set, here incomplete) and earlier novella The Imposter is a Cortazar-prefiguring masterpiece of a certain unrelenting narrative pull of another world, until reader and subjective reality cross over into a new understanding. Simultaneously incomplete and overwhelming, yet essential.

I can't say that I enjoyed this book. I picked it up because the back cover listed Borges and Calvino as fans of Ocampo, but I didn't feel any similarities.I'm not sure if I can explain why I don't like the book, but I'll try. The writing style felt very forgettable, so that my eyes seemed to gloss over everything. I think part of the reason is because all the stories are quite similar, like 100 different versions of the same story. The characters and writing style often felt interchangeable. I don't think her stories are able to use the potential of literary form, so that her stories feel like passive plays. She does not describe the world but creates a bland room where the entire action is in the dialogue. I think it should be performed rather than read. Since my mind, when reading the stories, doesn't create a world, I felt very disengaged from the writer/reader process. The stories remind me of Krapp's Last Tape, a one act play by Samuel Beckett. Not to put down the play, I love it, but that it is short, little environment, and has a passive voice.Impotence, dolls, and outside forces seem to be her themes.My favourite story, which reminded me a bit of Poe and Lovecraft, was The Imposter. It is the only one that I would recommend, but not even wholeheartedly.To be clear, I didn't dislike the stories, I just didn't like them. It's the absence of an emotion more than anything.