Hebdomeros: With Monsieur Dudron's Adventure and Other Metaphysical Writings

Rating:
Summary: Unearthly
Review: 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."

Rating:
Summary: De Chirico's paintings in verbal form
Review: Those who've sampled the often arrogant and self-glorifying work of Breton and other surrealists will find Hebdomeros to be unique. De Chirico's novel is poignantly shameful and delicately heart-wrenching. It isn't easily forgotton.