Among the many books written on or by Salvador Dali, this is the first to give a complete, well-documented picture of his life and art. Carlos Rojas's approach to Dali is somewhere between biography, Freudian analysis, and art and literary interpretation. Dali is haunted from earliest childhood by the specter of his elder brother who died as a toddler shortly before Dali was conceived (both brothers and the father bore the same name), as he is haunted by the devouring phantom of his mother, that praying mantis on whose portrait he would like to spit. Dali is seen as endlessly struggling to...