Face: 1981 begins with a quotation from Pierre Schoendoerffer: “Great things cannot be accomplished without love.” It continues with the words of the protagonist who has never had the leading role in life – not even his own: “I repeat: I’m innocent, just like you are. Even if I am guilty, remember, it can’t be more than you are…”

The most important and distinctive difference of Face: 1981 from Mehmet Eroğlu’s other novels is the personality of the leading character in the story. In all five of his previous novels, Mehmet Eroğlu places leftists with activist identities to the center as the main characters; this time, however, he highlights an ordinary stereotype we can easily see around us after 1990. In this respect, we can say that Face: 1981 is a novel through which Mehmet Eroğlu intends to scrutinize the people after the September 12^th  fascist coup d’etat: An anti-hero with no traces of imagination in his character, avoiding falling in love and weighing himself on the scale of the women he prefers to only have affairs with, who leads a life without any lasting traces, puts a misty distance between virtues and himself and on who concepts like love, loyalty and passion look as if they were borrowed or made by an amateur tailor is now being cut by the knife of Mehmet Eroğlu.

This Anti-Hero whose most significant skill is to make money and to carefully avoiding pain as if it were an illness- not having any strong motive all through his life - one day, discovers two secrets to conquer his life: The incredible disguising talent of his face – hiding him from other people – and the mysterious bond tying four 25-year old women to each other whom he had affairs with in the past! He found yellow the fittest for Duygu because of her melancholy, blue for Sevda due to her bright joy, white for Ferda remarks her innocence… and as for Işık, he resembles to a gloomy, non-arching, flat fantastical rainbow with no joy of life. Inside the building which can be resembled to Turkey, on the line there is a deep crack that connects the South wing to the main building. The Anti-Hero, trapped between the fights of the occupants, chase after these two secrets in fear. When and why has that change on his face occurred? What is that infectious thing flowing from his face towards these mysterious women? Is his existence in danger, too?

As the events proceeds, it appears that the distinctive picture of a life and typology of person that brought about into our society by force after September 12^th; we see how social conscience has become shallow and a life style which is nothing more than ego centric portrays of people loving themselves and putting themselves ahead of humanity. The Anti-Hero - at the end of a sexual journey between female bodies – solves both of the horrifying mysteries: The bond between his victims, Işık, Duygu, Sevda and Ferda, is more complicated than he has thought of and these four women assemble the holy, cherished life all together. “But if life turns its back to realities, forgets about compassion and love, closes its eyes to the future, doesn’t give it a try to reach beyond itself and becomes a matter of only protecting itself, it will decay with a deadly poison…” Face: 1981, which includes fantastic elements of adventure, is actually unfolding this contagious poison and giving a name to it.

The novel, with the richness of expressions, extraordinary figures of speech and descriptions of people, can be seen as a mile stone in Mehmet Eroğlu’s style. It ends with the Anti-Hero calling out to us: “Not doing any kindness to anybody cannot be taken as a vice, no, I can’t accept that… I repeat: Even if I am guilty, remember, the guilty I am not more than yours?”