One of the most revered and acclaimed products of Surrealism, de Chirico’s sole novel provides a uniquely literary analogue to his painterly scenarios

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 of 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.