This story takes place on a blue beach that embodies the artistic worlds of Salvador Dalí. Each element depicted on the pages of the book is a reference to a particular painting and also sheds light on the artist’s personality and his works, including “The Smoldering Donkey” (1928), “Swans Reflecting Elephants” (1937), “Apparition of a Face and a Bowl of Fruit on the Seashore” (1938), and “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate, a Second Before Awakening” (1944).
The story begins with a symbolic uprising of animals, birds, and insects. They ask the ocelot, the artist’s best friend, for Dalí to remove them from his paintings because he has depicted them incorrectly—not as they appear in the wild. Ocelot tries to explain to those who disagree how to understand Dali's invented universe, full of bizarre forms and fantasies.
The book is a hymn to the power of imagination and the skill of the great artist.