Can anyone recommend any biographies about either Federico Garcia Lorca or Dali? I'm especially interested in Garcia Lorca. Anything in Spanish or English would be lovely.
Thanks!
Ian Gibson's Federico Garcia Lorca - A Life, is what I would highly recommend.
Gibson's also wrote a bio for Dali - The Shameful Life, which is also very good
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I read The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dali by Meredith Etherington-Smith before watching Little Ashes and found it enormously informative and entertaining. It's a long book, but I didn't find it too hard to get through.
shareI read Tim McGirk's biography on Gala after I watched Little Ashes. The book gives you a pretty clear picture of both of them, Gala and Dalí. They surely deserved each other.
shareI didn't know there was one for Gala. And interesting read that, I bet.
"Talking to Rob on the Red Carpet....priceless"
http://www.rememberme-film.com/
Interesting, yes, but sometimes you really want to strangle her - and Dalí - because of the way they treated people. In a personal note at the end of the book the author said that he tried very hard to like Gala - after all he spent a lot of his time researching her life and writing about her - but had to admit that he could not. It wasn't the first time he wrote a biography but the first time the protagonist didn't grow dear to him. Quite the contrary, the more he knew about her, the less he liked her, and he despised the way she treated her daughter. Can't blame him, it really was cruel.
In the interview on the dvd, the director of Little Ashes said how well researched the script was. It's true, the book made me aware of that. I was never a fan of Dalí's paintings - give me any Picasso instead. Although I'm still not a fan of his work or the person, I did feel some compassion for him, after watching Little Ashes.
I wrote some articles on her. And I agree with the author. There were no redeeming qualities about Gala what so ever. She used everybody she ever met to further her own needs and wants, including Dali.
Dali wasn't exactly Mr. Nice Guy either, but something about the relationship with Lorca....some of the things that they wrote to each other, I saw a different side of him. Until Gala corrupted him entirely.
"Talking to Rob on the Red Carpet....priceless"
http://www.rememberme-film.com/
Yes, there must have been something Lorca saw in him. This is one of the good things about Little Ashes, it gives the audience an idea of the young Dalí. Most people, including me, remember only the older Dalí.
On the other hand, the poet Paul Éluard and the painter Max Ernst must have seen something in Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, too. Ernst dumped his wife Luise Straus and his son for Gala. Was it only her "erotic qualities" that Éluard never got tired of praising in front of his friends?