BOOKS REVIEWS: Hidden Faces (Salvador Dalí, 1944)

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The basic theme of Hidden Faces is love-in-death. We here have a treatment in modern dress of the ancient and perennial Tristan and Isolde myth. Nothing gives greater intensity to love than the imminence of death, and nothing gives greater poignancy to death than its irremediable severing of the bonds of love. The motif of death, however, is balanced by its counterpart: resurrection. This secondary but pervasive theme of new life emerging out of decay and destruction runs through the whole novel, and it is symbolised from the first page to the last by the forest of cork-oaks which pushes forth tender yellow-green shoots every spring in the plain of Creuz de Libreux.
...But perhaps the chief interest of this novel lies in the tramposition that the author makes from the values that are paramount in the plastic arts to those that belong to literary creation. For if it is true that Dali´s painting is figurative to the point of being photographic, and is in that sense ´old-fashioned´, his writing is above all enhanced by a stimulation of all the other senses - sound, smell, taste, touch - as well as by adumbrations of the ultra-sensory, the irrational, the spiritual and the interwoven in the warp and weft of human life as reflected in a hypersensitive consciousness. The story of the tangled lives of the protagonists - Count Hervé de Grandsailles, Solage de Cledá, John Randolph, Veroncia Stevens, Betka and the great - from the February riots in Paris in 1934 to the closing days of the war constitutes a dramatic and highly readable vehicle for the fireworks of Dali´s philosophical and psychological ideas and his verbal images.
...(...) Whether or not Dali paints as effectively with words as he does with brush and paint, those who have been fascinated by his pictorial creations cannot fail to find his venture into this new medium absorbing.

Haakon Chevalier

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