FICTION

Hidden Faces

by Salvador Dalí
Pushkin. Jun. 2024. 448p. tr. from French by Haakon Chevalier. ISBN 9781805330554. pap. $19.95. F
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In the grandiloquent preface to this eccentric 1944 work, audacious surrealist Dalí (1904–89) proclaims his intent to counter the modern mania for speed with a “long and boring ‘true novel.’” He very nearly succeeds. The plot of this extravagant funhouse is a raveled skein of mistaken identities and romantic entanglements betwixt an indulgent aristocrat, his idolized inamorata, a disfigured Yankee pilot, a wealthy American heiress, her polyamorous admirer, and various others, including Adolf Hitler. All of this is rendered in a mannered, ostentatious style described by the book’s translator, Chevalier, as a “lush jungle” of “superfluous epithet” and “elaborate festoons of redundancy,” never using one word where two—or five—will do.
VERDICT This isn’t as entertaining as Dalí’s gleefully self-mythologizing memoirs, but the outré decadence of his lone novel is not without its perverse delights, marking this out for cult status among devotees of Joris-Karl Huysmans and the Marquis de Sade.
Reviewed by David Wright , May 01, 2024
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