But it’s not lightly fictionalized autobiography along the lines of The Bell Jar.
mind-flaying masterpiece, held together by Carrington’s gifts of wit, imagination and suspense.Ī version of Carrington’s episode in the sanatorium also found its way into a novel, The Hearing Trumpet, written in the fifties or early sixties. Her 1974 novel, The Hearing Trumpet, newly reissued, stands out as something at last truly radical, undoing not only our expectations of time and space, but of the psyche and its boundaries. Ne of the great comic novels of the twentieth century, The Hearing Trumpet reads like a spectacular reassemblage of old and new genres, the campy, illegitimate offspring of Margaret Cavendish’s romances and Robert Graves’s histories, with Thomas Pynchon’s riotous paranoia spliced in to keep it limber and receptive to the political anxieties of its moment. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.” In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. If you’d like to be added to our reading group, please send us your name, email and phone number. A link to the Zoom meeting will be sent either the day before or on the morning of the meeting. Books are in stock now and reading group books purchased at the store receive a 15% discount.
Our next selection is The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. The Book Beat reading group will meet live at Zoom online on Wednesday May 26, at 7 PM. “Her book deals engagingly with Carrington’s short-lived reunion with a still-smitten Ernst in Lisbon and New York, her two marriages, and in particular her friendship in Mexico City with Remedios Varo, the painter and wife of the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret.” - The Guardian If you’d like to read further, we have UK copies in stock The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorehead.
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