Hebdomeros & Other writings - Giorgio de Chirico

Translated by John Ashbery, Mark Polizzotti, et al.
Introduction by John Ashbery

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.

Exact Change, 2003
English
Softcover, 280 pages
200mm x 150mm