Bob Moyer considers a reissue of the novel Salvador Dali published in 1944.

Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer

HIDDEN FACES. By Salvador Dali. Pushkin Press Classics. 352 pages.  $16.95

If …

. . . You are obsessed with Salvador Dali, have visited his  incredible museums in Spain and Florida, have a replica of the melted watch on your wrist, own a Dali print in a prominent place in your house. . .

. . . You have a hankering to correlate all the characters in the book to characters in his social circles, and how he skewered most of them. . .

. . . You can withstand trudging through a surfeit of descriptive words, words that if paint he would have excised from his carefully detailed paintings. . .

. . . You can stand an unhelpful translation, executed by a translator who openly admits Dali was a “master of the mixed metaphor, the superfluous epithet”. . .

. . .then:

You may be able to finish this book.

Dali mistook his genius at slinging paint for a wider creativity that gave him dispatch to throw words at a page, mistaking the ill-advised obscuration for illumination. This recent edition of his 1944 novel is at best an interesting artifact of a devilishly creative spirit, who loved the attention he drew to himself as much as he loved doing the same to his art.