Hidden Faces

Dali, Salvador

Softcover

ISBN 10: 072060687X ISBN 13: 9780720606874

Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers, 1987

Dali's only novel. In richly visual language Dali describes the lives and loves of a group of aristocratic characters who, in their beauty, luxury, and extravagance, symbolize the decadent Europe 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 war, is a brilliant vehicle for Dali's ideas, and an evocation of pre-war Europe. Valuable not only for Dali's own specially drawn illustrations, but also because it synthesizes all of the themes in Dali's art.

Review:

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

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

Flames positively lick from Salvador Dalí s pages. --Hilary Spurling, Harpers & Queen

From the Back Cover:

In Salvador Dali's Hidden Faces - now in its sixth impression in English - we enter the bizarre world already familiar to us from his paintings. Dali 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 Europe in the 1930's. The story of the tangled lives of the protagonists, from the Paris riots of February 1934 to the closing days of the Second World War, constitutes a brilliant and dramatic vehicle for Dali's unique vision and reads as an epitaph to pre-war Europe.

'The book is ... 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, The Observer

'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 ... Dali notices everthing ...' PJ Kavanagh, Guardian