THE UNSPEAKABLE CONFESSIONS OF SALVADOR DALI

The first Dali autobiography (1946) sent peristaltic shock waves rippling through all classes and climes, and this may too, where it's read, which would be a great triumph for the old master. Here (as told to Andre Parinaud) Dali seems more human: thanks largely to an exceptionally nimble translator who can reproduce every curlicue of Dali's style and considerable wit; thanks also to an obliging Q-and-A format that lets him sound off about the Spanish soul, high society, shit, grasshoppers, everything he cares about and permits the elision of awkward public moments such as the Spanish Civil War and WW II. There are also signs of a new dimensionality in Dali himself--a moving remembrance of poet Rene Crevel; a de-hokumized and rather marvelous account of his meeting with Gala, who became Mrs. Dali; the comedy he makes of the times he was brought up on charges before Breton at surrealist ""tribunals."" Observing the rich and famous, he is his old bitchy self, quotable without parallel (Helena Rubenstein: ""the character of an unyielding corset""); but his narcissism can still be infinitely tedious; it's sheer caprice how he will treat the lower orders. Dali has not become a nice person--only a genuinely interesting one and he also emerges as a bona fide paranoiac.