Hebdomeros and Other Writings

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Overview

The artist Giorgio de Chirico's novel, Hebdomeros is a dream-like book of situations and landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book "the finest work of Surrealist fiction," noting that de Chirico "invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel . . . his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom o f narration . . . his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects ...
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Overview

The artist Giorgio de Chirico's novel, Hebdomeros is a dream-like book of situations and landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book "the finest work of Surrealist fiction," noting that de Chirico "invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel . . . his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom o f narration . . . his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality." Hebdomeros is accompanied by an appendix of previously untranslated or uncollected writings, including M. Dudron's Adventure, a second, fragmentary novel translated by John Ashbery.
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Editorial Reviews

Seattle Weekly
"This novel contains maddeningly brilliant mental photographs of an active mind's eye. De Chirico creates a painterly universe in every sentence. Exact Change's stellar line of Surrealist reprints may very well boast de Chirico's novel as its flagship."
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Written in 1929, this is the great metaphysical painter's only novel. Though it is a rare example of surrealistic prose, De Chirico had, by the time he wrote it, rejected surrealism in painting and embraced a metaphysical classicism. The result is an original blending of styles, a series of vignettes and visions, surprisingly fresh after six decades, written with complete disdain for time and space. The eponymous Hebdomeros remembers, imagines and experiences images and events: he describes gods and innkeepers; is horrified of gastronomes (``he considered strawberries and figs the most immoral fruits''); attacks fashionable artists (``the living and walking symbol of human stupidity''); and invents scenarios that are often more like those of Lewis Carroll than of Huysmans or Homer. With subjects ranging from the thrill of everyday objects and sensations to the story of the prodigal son, De Chirico leaps wildly from non sequitur``Hebdomeros had never thought of associating the idea of hangovers with that of fish''to bizarre conceptions of ``eternal noon.'' Replete with hallmark melancholy, foreboding and Freudian imageryclose, in fact, to a prose translation of De Chirico's early work on canvasHebdomeros is a fascinating look into a creative mind. Illustrated with 11 drawings. (May)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781878972064
  • Publisher: Exact Change
  • Publication date: 12/28/1992
  • Pages: 280
  • Sales rank: 1,356,460
  • Product dimensions: 6.02 (w) x 7.96 (h) x 0.83 (d)

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