Dali and the Path of Dreams

An attractively produced book that seeks to introduce children to te work of the great surrealist by spinning an unlikely narrative around and through many of the painter's familiar visual motifs. The young 'Salvi' shares his dreams with us as we are led through some of those landscapes populated by melting, slithering clocks, stilt-legged elephants and distorted furniture. At the end of the journey we reach Dali's adulthood and are given a brief summary of his life as an artist. The text is delivered in an appropriately dream-like tone, but it is a tall order for any artist to recreate Salvador Dali's combination of vision and consummate technical skill, and here the illustrations, being executed 'in the manner of' suffer from the inevitable compulsion to compare to the technique of the great man himself.