- ISBN: 978 0 7206 1304 9
- Fiction
- Paperback
- £13.50
- 320pp
- Available
|
Hidden
Faces
Salvador Dalí
Translated from the Spanish by Haakon Chevalier
‘As far back as 1922 the great poet Garcia Lorca had
predicted that I was destined for a literary career and had
suggested that my future lie precisely in the “pure
novel”.’ In
this book, the only novel by Salvador Dalí and now
in its seventh paperback edition, the reader enters
the bizarre world already familiar to us from his paintings.
Dalí describes, in vividly visual terms, the intrigues
and love affairs of a group of dazzling, eccentric aristocrats
who, with their luxurious and extravagant lifestyle, symbolize
the decadence of the 1930s. The story of the tangled lives
of the protagonists, from the February riots of 1934 in Paris to the closing
days of the Second World War, constitutes a brilliant and dramatic vehicle for
Dalí’s vision and reads as an epitaph of pre-war Europe
‘DalÍ’s only novel is as bizarre and
as jewelled as any of his work. Written in the autumn of
1943 in New Hampshire, DalÍ (above) devoted “14
implacable hours a day” to it – first “because
I have time to do everything I want to do”, secondly “because
contemporary history offers a unique framework for a novel
dealing with the development and the conflicts of great
human passions”, and thirdly, “because if I
had not written it another would have done it . . . and
badly”. The bravado is typical. As his translator points
out, DalÍ never uses one word if he can use two – or
five. The prose is adjective-laden, the style meandering,
the sentiment extravagant. Set in the days before the Second
World War, Hidden Faces concerns a group of aesthetes around
Count Hervé de Grandsailles. Among them is his beloved
Solange de Cleda, a classic Daliesque creation. All costumes
are minutely noted, but Solange’s are the most memorable,
including her “Chanel dress, with a very low neck,
edged with roses cut out of three thicknesses of black
and beige lace, between which were hidden rather large
pearl caterpillars”. Solange represents “Cledalism” – going
on a stage from sadism and masochism, “pleasure and
pain sublimated in an all-transcending identification with
the object”. She is “a profane St Teresa”.
For all its showing off, the novel is a serious account of
the extremes of experience forced by war. Most surprising
is a prophetic scene with Hitler, defeated, in his tower
at Berchtesgaden, and gloating over the stolen treasures
of the world while listening to Wagner. We can all recognise
the masks in DalÍ’s
art. We all remember the moustached mask he wore himself
in life. DalÍ’s novel is the work of the clown
who sees behind the smile. Hidden Faces is an apt title
for something so glittering and sinister.’ – Margaret Reynolds,
Times
‘Start the first page and you are in
the presence of an old-fashioned baroque novel, intelligent, extravagant,
as photographically precise as his paintings but not so silly . . .
Dalí notices everything.’ – P.J. Kavanagh, Guardian
‘Flames positively lick from Salvador Dalí’s pages.’ – Hilary Spurling, Harpers & Queen
‘What really strikes the reader is the abounding physical detail of objects,
light, spaces, or materials.’ – Times
‘So full of visual invention, so witty, so charged with an almost Dickensian
energy that it's difficult not to accept its author's own arrogant valuation
of himself as a genius.’ – George Melly
|
