The artist Giorgio de Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros is astonishing 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 of narration… his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality." Hebdomeros is presented here in an excellent translation from the French that has until now been available only in an obscure limited edition; and it 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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"This novel contains maddeningly brilliant mental photographs of an active mind’s eye… De Chirico creates a painterly universe in every sentence…" -- Seattle Weekly
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5.0 out of 5 stars
6 reviews
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unearthly
2 Jun 1999
By A Customer
- Published on Amazon.com
HEBDOMEROS is quite unearthly and would be a disappointment to anyone looking for a conventional novel. But you are likely here for something else. It moves with the logic of a dream, passing from one scene to the next with the same warp of tension a plotted novel might have, yet HEBDOMEROS has no plot, it is errant, distracted. "It's strange," Hebdomeros was thinking, "as for me, the idea that something had escaped my understanding would keep me awake at nights, whereas people in general are not in the least perturbed when they see or read or things that they find completely obscure." This from the opening page, a comment on its own strangeness, instructing the reader a little in what is to come. And what follows is completely beautiful. Here is something to finish on: "Hebdomeros turned his steps again toward the rivers with the concrete banks, toward the decaying palaces whose domes and weather vanes rose up under the ever-fleeing clouds. This forbidding place whose solemn door was closed at the moment ought to have saddened him, but the recollection of what he had seen there during moments spent in the midst of a scattered and indifferent public was quite enough to console him. He saw, moving up slowly out of the chiaroscuro of his memory and little by little defining themselves in his mind, the shapes of those temples and sanctuaries built in plaster that stand at the foot of sheltering mountains and rocks through which ran narrow passes that made one strangely aware not only of the unknown worlds nearby, but also of those distant horizons heavy with adventure that ever since his unhappy childhood Hebdomeros had always loved."
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hebdomeros - Giorgio De Chirico
15 Dec 2006
By Mark Eckenrode
- Published on Amazon.com
Giorgio De Chirico is considered one of the founders of the Surrealist school of art, and this is his only novel. De Chirico is famous for a body of work created early in the Twentieth Century, approximately coinciding with the First World War, whose works are classified as "Metaphysical Painting"; these works depict haunting, desolate landscapes and odd arrangements of seemingly incongruous arrangements of objects, depicted with illogical perspectives. Hebdomeros - published in 1929, about ten years after De Chirico abandoned his earlier style in favor of a neo-classical style he was to embrace for the rest of his career - is in the spirit and has the feel of his earlier works; it is a prose version of those haunting landscapes and still lifes.
Hebdomeros cannot be said to have a story or a plot; it is more like an extended series of visions, a tour through the protagonist's dreamlike experiences. The story has an odd familiarity in the form of a similarity to the disconnectedness and illogicality of our dreams or reveries. It feels like being immersed in somebody's dream. Hebdomeros is a featureless being; this novel is not about him but about his experiences.
This novel is like a form of prose poetry. The scenes and images he strings together paint for the mind's eye the same sort of haunting, desolate images represented in his famous works. People, places, things and events have an inner logic of their own, but they all somehow harmonize together into a coherence reminiscent of our dreams.
This is perhaps one of the few novels that can make you look forward to reading it a second time. It is a testament to De Chirico's genius as an artist that he was able to so successfully translate into another medium the world created by his famous works of visual art.
Hebdomeros cannot be said to have a story or a plot; it is more like an extended series of visions, a tour through the protagonist's dreamlike experiences. The story has an odd familiarity in the form of a similarity to the disconnectedness and illogicality of our dreams or reveries. It feels like being immersed in somebody's dream. Hebdomeros is a featureless being; this novel is not about him but about his experiences.
This novel is like a form of prose poetry. The scenes and images he strings together paint for the mind's eye the same sort of haunting, desolate images represented in his famous works. People, places, things and events have an inner logic of their own, but they all somehow harmonize together into a coherence reminiscent of our dreams.
This is perhaps one of the few novels that can make you look forward to reading it a second time. It is a testament to De Chirico's genius as an artist that he was able to so successfully translate into another medium the world created by his famous works of visual art.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unearthly
2 Jun 1999
By A Customer
- Published on Amazon.com
HEBDOMEROS is quite unearthly and would be a disappointment to anyone looking for a conventional novel. But you are likely here for something else. It moves with the logic of a dream, passing from one scene to the next with the same warp of tension a plotted novel might have, yet HEBDOMEROS has no plot, it is errant, distracted. "It's strange," Hebdomeros was thinking, "as for me, the idea that something had escaped my understanding would keep me awake at nights, whereas people in general are not in the least perturbed when they see or read or hear things that they find completely obscure." This from the opening page, a comment on its own strangeness, instructs the reader a little in what is to come. And what follows is completely beautiful. Here is something to finish on: "Hebdomeros turned his steps again toward the rivers with the concrete banks, toward the decaying palaces whose domes and weather vanes rose up under the ever-fleeing clouds. This forbidding place whose solemn door was closed at the moment ought to have saddened him, but the recollection of what he had seen there during moments spent in the midst of a scattered and indifferent public was quite enough to console him. He saw, moving up slowly out of the chiaroscuro of his memory and little by little defining themselves in his mind, the shapes of those temples and sanctuaries built in plaster that stand at the foot of sheltering mountains and rocks through which ran narrow passes that made one strangely aware not only of the unknown worlds nearby, but also of those distant horizons heavy with adventure that ever since his unhappy childhood Hebdomeros had always loved."
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