Cagliostro is a lurid tale of magic and secret societies during the reign of Luis XVI, centred on the figure of the Italian occultist Giuseppe Balsamo, known under his alias of Count Alessandro di Cagliostro. The book owes its style of presentation to the example of German expressionist cinema, of the kind exempli-fied by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari .

In the 1920s, Huidobro — always fascinated by the new medium of film — apparently wrote a film script on the subject of Cagliostro, a treatment very much in tune with the German expressionist cinema of the early 20s. Huidobro claimed that the film was made in 1923 by the Romanian director Mime Mizu but that this had been scrapped due to dissatisfaction over the editing. No trace of the film survives, although three pages of a script do appear in the author's papers. A revised version was submitted to The League for Better Motion Pictures in New York and won a $10,000 prize as the best candidate for filming — just at the point when the "talkies" arrived and this style of film was rendered immediately outmoded. Making the best of the situation, Huidobro converted the script into a novella, with many cinematic elements, and it was published in translation in 1931 in both London and New York, to positive reviews, under the title Mirror of a Mage. It appeared in the original Spanish only in 1934, in Santiago, and had no impact at all. This edition reproduces the text of the 1931 translation, with some introductory elements added from the Spanish edition.

Order also from these retailers:

Order from amazon.com