Salvador Dalí - Hidden Faces

‘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 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

Translated from the Spanish by Haakon Chevalier

Publisher: Peter Owen
ISBN: 9780720613049
Pages: 318
Binding: softback
Dimensions: 194 x 130 mm

Price: £13.50

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