A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil

I actually prefer this one to "the hundred headless woman". This one realize more on the narrative and less on the collage work to convey the story.

I give 5 stars for the book as the book itself is a masterpiece by the great Max Ernst. I only have one complaint, the book arrived in a bubble envelope and some pages where all bent and there is nothing I can do about it. Other than that, it's perfect.

Max Ernst, the creator of the collage novel, is still the master of that distinctive genre, as the dreamlike & haunting pages of A LITTLE GIRL DREAMS OF TAKING THE VEIL reveals. First published in 1930, it's lost none of its power to entice, seduce, disorient, and astonish the reader. Each new reading brings out something new in the work ... and in the reader, as well. Certainly it does in this reader! The juxtaposition of what would ordinarily be the most mundane of images creates a beautiful frisson, a reminder that the familiar & even boring surface of the everyday is actually no more than an ephemeral veil of normality, and that both wonders & terrors live behind it at all times. Most highly recommended!

First published in Paris in 1930, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil is Max Ernst's second collage-novel. One of the forermost surrealist artists, Max Ernst has created here a bizarre and enchanting set of images by juxtaposing illustrations from all kinds of books new and old. The collages tell the dream of a young who, having lost her virginity on the day of her first communion, commits herself to a religous vocation. Her dream is an impious and schizophrenic nightmare richly and ironically conceived. Full of alarming images this dreamscape resisits rational interpretation.A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil is a haunting tour de force which has lost none of its shock or value

Hector I also learned of this from David Sylvian. I bought a copy. Is a very interesting read and haunting.

Buyers should be warned about this edition. They may be expecting one of Dover Books' large, clear facsimile editions, like the Dover edition of Max Ernst's "Une Semaine de Bonte", or the Gustave Dore Dante, in A4-size format. Only such an edition can bring out the extraordinary strangeness of Ernst's collages, which depends on the detail of what's happening in the images. Instead they will get a miserably shrunk little reprint, where the detail is reduced to mud.Some editor must have thought this would be a simple economy; that editor clearly knows nothing about art and what makes it work. Compare the detail of p. 31, "Allons! Dansons la Tenebreuse", with the same piece reproduced in the catalogue of the 1991 Tate exhibition.Dover have had a reputation, over the decades, for intelligent choices and trustworthy reproduction. They will soon lose it this way.