The Hearing Trumpet

By Leonora Carrington and Olga Tokarczuk

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel.

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. 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. 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. 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.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Release date: Jan 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781681374659

Book preview

The Hearing Trumpet

LEONORA CARRINGTON (1917–2011) was born in Lancashire, England, to an industrialist father and an Irish mother. She was raised on fantastical folktales told to her by her Irish nanny at her family’s estate, Crookhey Hall. Carrington would be expelled from two convent schools before enrolling in art school in Florence. In 1937, a year after her mother gave her a book on surrealist art featuring Max Ernst’s work, she met the artist at a party. Not long after, Carrington and the then-married Ernst settled in the south of France, where Carrington completed her first major painting, Self-Portrait (The Inn of the Dawn Horse), in 1938. In the wake of Ernst’s imprisonment by the Nazis, Carrington fled to Spain, where she suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital in Madrid. She eventually escaped to the Mexican embassy in Lisbon and settled first in New York and later in Mexico, where she married the photographer Imre Weisz and had two sons. Carrington spent the rest of her life in Mexico City, moving in a circle of like-minded artists that included Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Among Carrington’s published works are a novel, The Hearing Trumpet (1976); two collections of short stories; and a memoir of madness, Down Below. Both Down Below and The Milk of Dreams, an illustrated group of stories she originally wrote for her children, are available from New York Review Books.

OLGA TOKARCZUK is the author of nine novels and three short-story collections. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize and she is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature.

THE HEARING TRUMPET

LEONORA CARRINGTON

Illustrations by

PABLO WEISZ CARRINGTON

Afterword by

OLGA TOKARCZUK

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1974, 1976 by Leonora Carrington

Afterword copyright © 2020 by Olga Tokarczuk

All rights reserved.

Originally published in French translation as Le Cornet acoustique.

Cover image: Leonora Carrington, Play Shadow, 1977; private collection; © 2020 Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photograph © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carrington, Leonora, 1917–2011, author. | Tokarczuk, Olga, 1962– writer of afterword.

Title: The hearing trumpet / by Leonora Carrington ; [afterword by Olga Tokarczuk].

Description: New York: New York Review Books, [2020] | Series: New York Review Books classics

Identifiers: LCCN 2020005721 | ISBN 9781681374642 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681374659 (ebook)

Subjects: GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

Classification: LCC PR6053.A6965 H4 2020 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005721

ISBN 978-1-68137-465-9

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

CONTENTS

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Copyright and More Information

THE HEARING TRUMPET

Afterword

THE HEARING TRUMPET

WHEN CARMELLA gave me the present of a hearing trumpet she may have foreseen some of the consequences. Carmella is not what I would call malicious, she just happens to have a curious sense of humour. The trumpet was certainly a fine specimen of its kind, without being really modern. It was, however, exceptionally pretty, being encrusted with silver and mother o’pearl motives and grandly curved like a buffalo’s horn. The aesthetic presence of this object was not its only quality, the hearing trumpet magnified sound to such a degree that ordinary conversation became quite audible even to my ears.

Here I must say that all my senses are by no means impaired by age. My sight is still excellent although I use spectacles for reading, when I read, which I practically never do. True, rheumatics have bent my skeleton somewhat. This does not prevent me taking a walk in clement weather and sweeping my room once a week, on Thursday, a form of exercise which is both useful and edifying. Here I may add that I consider that I am still a useful member of society and I believe still capable of being pleasant and amusing when the occasion seems fit. The fact that I have no teeth and never could wear dentures does not in any way discomfort me, I don’t have to bite anybody and there are all sorts of soft edible foods easy to procure and digestible to the stomach. Mashed vegetables, chocolate and bread dipped in warm water make the base of my simple diet. I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway.

I am now ninety-two and for some fifteen years I have lived with my son and his family. Our house is situated in a residential district and would be described in England as a semi-detached villa with a small garden. I don’t know what they call it here but probably some Spanish equivalent of spacious residence with park. This is untrue, the house is not spacious, it is cramped, there is nothing resembling even faintly a park. There is, however, a fine back yard which I share with my two cats, a hen, the maid and her two children, some flies and a cactus plant called maguey.

My room looks onto this nice back yard which is very convenient as there are no stairs to negotiate—I merely have to open the door in order to enjoy the stars at night or the early morning sun, the only manifestation of sunlight which I can abide. The maid, Rosina, is an Indian woman with a morose character and seems generally opposed to the rest of humanity. I do not believe that she puts me in a human category so our relationship is not disagreeable. The maguey plant, the flies and myself are things which occupy the back yard, we are elements of the landscape and are accepted as such. The cats are another matter. Their individuality puts Rosina into fits of delight or fury according to her temper. She talks to the cats, she never talks to her children at all, although I think she likes them in her own way.

I never could understand this country and now I am beginning to be afraid that I never will get back to the north, never get away from here. I must not give up hope, miracles can happen and very often do happen. People think fifty years is a long time to visit any country because it is often more than half a lifetime. To me fifty years is no more than a space of time stuck somewhere I don’t really want to be at all. For the last forty-five years I have been trying to get away. Somehow I never could, there must be a binding spell which keeps me in this country. Sometime I shall find out why I stayed so long here, while I am happily contemplating reindeer and snow, cherry trees, meadows, the song of the thrush.

England is not always the focus of these dreams. I do not, in fact, particularly want to install myself in England although I will have to visit my mother in London, she is getting old now, although enjoying excellent health. A hundred and ten is not such a great age, from a biblical point of view at least. Margrave, my mother’s valet, who sends me postcards of Buckingham Palace, tells me she is still very spry in her wheelchair, although how anyone can be spry in a wheelchair I really don’t know. He says she is quite blind but has no beard which must be a reference to a photograph of myself which I sent as a Christmas gift last year.

Indeed I do have a short grey beard which conventional people would find repulsive. Personally I find it rather gallant.

England would be a matter of a few weeks, then I would join my lifelong dream of going to Lapland to be drawn in a vehicle by dogs, woolly dogs.

All this is a digression and I do not wish anyone to think my mind wanders far, it wanders but never further than I want.

So, I live with my Galahad, mostly in the back yard.

Now Galahad has a rather large family and he is by no means rich. He lives on a small wage paid to consular employees, those who are not actually ambassadors. (These, I am told, get a more ample salary from the government.) Galahad is married to the daughter of the manager of a cement factory. Her name is Muriel and both her parents are English. Muriel has five children one of which, the youngest, still lives here with us. This boy, Robert, is twenty-five and has not married yet. Robert is not a pleasant character and even as a child was unkind to cats. He also circulates on a motorcycle and introduced a television set into the house. From that time on my visits to front regions of our residence became increasingly rare. If I ever appear there now it is always rather in the nature of a spectre, if I may say so. This seems to give a certain relief to the rest of the family as my table manners were becoming unconventional. With age one becomes rather less sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of others; for instance at the age of forty I would have hesitated to eat oranges in a crowded tram or bus, today I would not only eat oranges with impunity but I would take an entire meal unblushingly in any public vehicle and wash it down with a glass of port which I take now and again as a special treat.

Nevertheless I make myself useful and help in the kitchen which is next door to my room. I peel vegetables, feed the hen, and, as I mentioned before, carry out other violent activities like sweeping out my room on Thursdays. I give no trouble at all and keep myself clean with no assistance from anybody.

Every week brings a certain amount of mild enjoyment; every night, in fine weather, the sky, the stars, and of course the moon in her season. On Mondays, in clement weather, I walk two blocks down the road and visit my friend Carmella. She lives in a very small house with her niece who bakes cakes for a Swedish teashop although she is Spanish. Carmella has a very pleasant life and is really very intellectual. She reads books through an elegant lorgnette and hardly ever mumbles to herself as I do. She also knits very clever jumpers but her real pleasure in life is writing letters. Carmella writes letters all over the world to people she has never met and signs them with all sorts of romantic names, never her own. Carmella despises anonymous letters, and of course they would be impractical as who could answer a letter with no name at all signed at the end? These wonderful letters fly off, in a celestial way, by airmail, in Carmella’s delicate handwriting. No one ever replies. This is the really incomprehensible side of humanity, people never have time for anything.

Well one fine Monday morning I went on my usual visit to Carmella who was actually waiting for me on the doorstep. I could see at once that she was in a state of high excitement as she had forgotten to put on her wig. Carmella is bald. She would never go onto the street without her wig on ordinary occasions as she is rather vain, her red wig is a kind of queenly gesture to her long lost hair, which was almost as red as her wig if my memory is correct. This Monday morning Carmella was uncrowned with her usual glory but very excited and mumbling to herself, which is not her ordinary habit. I had brought her an egg which the hen had laid the same morning, I dropped it as she clutched my arm. This was a great pity as the egg was now beyond repair.

I was waiting for you, Marian, you are twenty minutes late, she said taking no notice of the broken egg. Some day you will forget to come at all. Her voice was a thin shriek and this was more or less what she said, because of course I did not hear it all. She pulled me inside the house and after several attempts gave me to understand that she had a present for me. A present, a present, a present. Now Carmella has given me presents several times and they are sometimes knitted and sometimes comestible, but I never saw her so excited. When she unwrapped the hearing trumpet I was at a loss to know whether it could be used for eating or drinking or merely for ornament. After many complicated gestures she finally put it to my ear and what I had always heard as a thin shriek went through my head like the bellow of an angry bull. Can you hear me Marian?

Indeed I could, it was terrifying.

Can you hear me Marian?

I nodded speechlessly, this frightful noise was worse than Robert’s motorcycle.

This magnificent trumpet is going to change your life.

Finally I said For goodness sake don’t shout you make me nervous.

A miracle! said Carmella, still excited, then using a quieter voice, Your life will be changed.

We both sat down and sucked a violet scented lozenge which Carmella likes because it scents the breath; I am now getting used to the rather nasty taste and beginning to like them through my fondness for Carmella. We thought about all the revolutionary possibilities of the trumpet.

Not only will you be able to sit and listen to beautiful music and intelligent conversation but you will also have the privilege of being able to spy on what your whole family are saying about you, and that ought to be very amusing. Carmella had finished her lozenge and had lit a small black cigar which she reserves for special occasions. You must of course be very secretive about the trumpet because they might take it away from you if they don’t want you to hear what they are saying.

Why should they want to hide anything from me? I asked, thinking about Carmella’s incurable passion for drama. I don’t give them any trouble and they almost never see me.

You never know, said Carmella. People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats. You can’t be too careful. Besides, think of the exhilarating power of listening to others talk when they think you cannot hear.

They can hardly avoid seeing the trumpet, I said doubtfully. It must be a buffalo’s horn, buffalos are very large animals.

Of course you must not let them see you using it, you have to hide somewhere and listen. I hadn’t thought of that, it certainly promised infinite possibilities.

Well, Carmella, I think it is very kind of you and this mother o’pearl floral design is very pretty indeed, it looks Jacobean.

You will also be able to listen to my last letter which I haven’t sent yet as I was waiting to read it to you. Ever since I stole the Paris telephone directory from the consulate I have increased my output. You have no ideas of the beautiful names in Paris. This letter is addressed to Monsieur Belvedere Oise Noisis, rue de la Rechte Potin, Paris IIe. You could hardly invent anything more sonorous even if you tried. I see him as a rather frail old gentleman, still elegant, with a passion for tropical mushrooms which he grows in an Empire wardrobe. He wears embroidered waistcoats and travels with purple luggage.

You know Carmella I sometimes think that you might get a reply if you didn’t impose your imagination on people you have never seen. Monsieur Belvedere Oise Noisis is undoubtedly a very nice name, but suppose he is fat and collects wicker baskets? Suppose he never travels and has no luggage, suppose he is a young man with a nautical yearning? You must be more realistic I think.

You are sometimes very negative minded Marian, although I know you have a kind heart, that is no reason that poor Monsieur Belvedere Oise Noisis should do anything so trivial as collecting wicker baskets. He is fragile but intrepid, I intend to send him some mushroom spore to enrich the species which he had sent from the Himalayas. There was no more to be said so Carmella read the letter. She was pretending to be a famous Peruvian alpinist who had lost an arm trying to save the life of a grisly bear cub trapped on the edge of a precipice. The mother bear had unkindly bitten off her arm. She went on to give all sorts of information about high altitude fungus and offered to send samples. It seemed to me that she took too much for granted.

When I left Carmella’s house it was almost lunchtime. I carried my mysterious parcel under my shawl, walking very slowly in order to reserve energy. I was feeling quite excited by this time and had almost forgotten that there was to be tomato soup

Reviews for The Hearing Trumpet

[charon07 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a wild and wonderful fable about some amazing old ladies! It begins when Marian Leatherby’s friend Carmella gives her a hearing trumpet, so that she is now able to hear that her family is sending her to an old folks home. But what an old folks home it is! The residents are housed in a strange array of concrete outbuildings that I visualized as a giant miniature golf course. And that’s before things get weird.

“All this is a digression and I do not wish anyone to think my mind wanders far, it wanders but never further than I want.”

Toss in the venal New Age-y owners of the nursing home who encourage residents to do the Work of Self Remembering, a cast of whacky old women, a winking Abbess, the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, and even more progressively surreal events, and it’s like Foucault’s Pendulum in Wonderland, only hilarious.

“One would not have expected these kinds of problems in a home for senile old ladies.” Indeed.

[pacomd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Just a first impression: Wonderfully crazy book that could well be one of the forgotten classics. Many a modern novelist could learn from this mixture of humour, White Goddess mythology, serious religious statements, and general misbehaviour by the not so adorable little old ladies.

[francesanngray · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Strangest book I've ever read.

[scolgo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fierce and surreal feminist fiction. I'm not well-read enough to have caught all the literary allusions Carrington peppered throughout this astonishing little book, but I did catch a few. I never knew where Marian's adventures were headed but it was pure delight to go tripping along with her.

[pamelad_570511 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It made me laugh so many times. I'd be reading away with a small smile when something so ridiculous, so unexpected, would be so delightfully funny that I'd laugh out loud.

Marian Leatherby is 92 and has been living with her son and daughter-in-law for the last fifteen years. She's almost deaf, so she can't hear what her family is saying about her until her friend Carmella gives her a hearing trumpet. Carmella is a wonderful character, as are Marian and all the other old ladies in this book.

Weird things happen. Wait till you find out what happened to the leering nun whose portrait overlooks the dining table.

I don't usually read Fantasy, but I loved this book.

[lisapeet · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wonderfully weird tale of a very old woman consigned to a fantastical facility, the people she encounters there, and the adventures they have. It's full of strong-willed characters navigating old age and a very strange universe. Carrington's writing here has exactly the right surrealism-to-logic proportions to keep the book from spiraling out into whimsy—it's funny and dark, but never silly. It made for a great book club discussion, especially for all of us ladies of a certain age. Definitely recommended if you're one of those.

[patsymurray · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This feminist, surrealist novel also managed to be highly amusing. There was not a word out of place. I was so amused and intrigued I am planning to order all of her other books.

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beginning as a simple tale of some of the indignities of aging, this soon veered off into the surreal and magical, but in a way that I thoroughly enjoyed. 92 year old Marion lives with her son, her son's wife, and the wife's son. She is deaf and eccentric, and they barely tolerate her. Soon after the book opens, they place her in a home for elderly women where Marion becomes involved with assorted other eccentrics. Each lives in a separate building, one shaped like a birthday cake, one like a mushroom, and so on. Things become more and more bizarre.
The book was very funny. Carrington writes very well, and is a wonderful prose stylist. This is definitely a unique book, and one I will long remember.

Here are some snippets of "Marionisms" I enjoyed:

"Sleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be, I often mix them up."
"People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable, if they are not cats."
"I do not wish anyone to think my mind wanders far, it wanders, but never farther than I want."
"I am never lonely....Or rather I do not suffer from loneliness. I suffer much from the idea that my loneliness might be taken away from me by a lot of mercilessly well-meaning people."
and finally,
"At times I had thought of writing poetry myself, but getting words to rhyme with each other is difficult, like trying to drive a herd of turkeys and kangaroos down a crowded thoroughfare and keep them together without looking into shop windows. There are so many words and they all mean something."

4 stars

[booklove2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a kooky, fun ride this book is! The plot falls further and further down the rabbit hole, which is fitting as this could exist alongside 'Alice in Wonderland'. I feel this reminds me of so many books, but so many of the weird books I have read have probably been inspired by Leonora's writing. The details are so funny and so charming. I really enjoyed it.

Another favorite book of mine is Heidi Sopinka's 'The Dictionary of Animal Languages' which is inspired by Leonora Carrington's life using another name for the main character (Ivory). Now that I have read this book, I can definitely see that Ivory of 'Dictionary of Animal Languages' is also inspired by Marian Leatherby of 'The Hearing Trumpet', both being older women over the age of ninety recounting their memories. Marian says "my memory is full of all sorts of stuff which is not, perhaps, in chronological order, but there is a lot of it" - which is basically the plot and purpose of 'The Dictionary of Animal Languages' and Ivory of 'Dictionary' says that she is in a "protest against forgetting".

"Although freedom has come to us somewhat late in life, we have no intention of throwing it away again. Many of us have passed our lives with domineering and peevish husbands. When we were finally delivered of these we were chivvied around by our sons and daughters who not only no longer loved us, but considered us a burden and objects of ridicule and shame. Do you imagine in your wildest dreams that now we have tasted freedom we are going to let ourselves be pushed around once more by you and your leering mate?" (pg 154)

The book is definitely not only kooky. There is some real deep meaning and messages there.All three of these women - Leonora, Marian, and Ivory did not need to reach old age to be marginalized. In my mind, they exist in conversation with each other. I am very appreciative to 'The Hearing Trumpet' for at least opening my eyes to a new facet of 'The Dictionary of Animal Languages' and of course, Leonora herself.

[sanddune_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Born in 1917, Leonora Carrington was the archetypal Surrealist wild child and muse, and a painter and writer in her own right, who ran away from London to Paris age 19 to continue her love affair with the painter Max Ernst. Post war, and after incarceration in a Spanish mental institution, she settled in Mexico. The Hearing Trumpet is just as surprising and anarchic as you might expect from someone with Leonora Carrington’s history.

Marian Letherby, age 92, is an Englishwoman living in an unnamed Spanish-speaking American country with her son and his family. Given a hearing trumpet by her friend Carmella she discovers that her family is planning to send her to a home run by the ‘Well of Light Brotherhood:

‘The Well of Light Brotherhood’ said Carmella, ‘ is obviously something extremely sinister. Not I suppose a company for grinding old ladies into breakfast cereal, but something morally sinister. It all sounds terrible. I must think of something to rescue you from the jaws of the Well of Light’.’

On arrival at the home, Marion discovers that the ‘Well of Light’ is strange indeed:

‘The main building was in fact a castle, surrounded by various pavilions with incongruous shapes. Pixielike dwellings shaped like toadstools, Swiss chalets, railway carriages, one or two ordinary bungalows, something shaped like a boot, another like what I took to be an outsize Egyptian mummy.’

And why is there a very strange portrait of a winking nun in the dining hall?

The first half of The Hearing Trumpet is merely a little idiosyncratic, but halfway through Marion is given a manuscript to read: ‘A True and Faithful rendering of the Life of Rosalinda Alvarez Della Cueva, abbess of the Convent of Saint Barbara of Tartarus’ and after this things get very weird indeed.

I struggled with this half-way through, but the ending was so utterly unexpected and so very, very mad that it completely redeemed itself. Imagine a surrealist painting written down and you won’t go far wrong!

[emmakendon_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Stuck in the Home Counties during lockdown, and reading Sussex-related lit, this is a bit of a tangent. Loved by a couple of friends, and charming - especially Marian Leatherby herself, but I'm spoilt by Angela Carter & Fevvers! Some really fun moments, though, like the observation about people following governments, the fudge-poison sequence, every bit of spying and eavesdropping, and the calculation of how long it would take to collect enough cat fur for a sweater. Still, the only lockdown-walking related resonance really came from the sense of money and smugness of Chiddingly & East Hoathly, not least the Parsonage and its huge land ownership, in the service of 'their angry and vicious God'.

[jayeless-698797 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't want you to think this is a begrudging three stars; I really did like it. The book is very strange and weird, and I feel like a LOT of it went over my head, but... it was short (as I must have mentioned, this quality in a book will make me forgive a lot of sins), and it is highly quotable.

For instance, some quotes I got out of it - "Policemen are not human beings so how can police dogs be animals?" and "the notoriously pig-headed race of Britain…" (as an Anglo, this one cracked me up quite a lot.)

I also like the idea of writing about old women who've been basically cast out by their families, because they're too old to be considered properly "human" any more. And that's such a depressing idea, so I like that this book was quite light-hearted and good-humoured about it, without shying away from it at all.

It's just, like I said, I felt like a lot went over my head... and at one point there was a 27-page diversion to describe the history of some people and I tend to dislike it when books do that. But yeah. Overall, I liked it, and that's what three stars is meant to suggest so there!

[estramir · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Hearing Trumpet is a fantastic little book, way ahead of it's time, it should be classed as a classic. To have the main character as a woman in her 90's is very empowering for those of us who are feeling a little old! Absolutely enjoyable and eccentric. Leonora Carrington was a most remarkable person by all accounts, if you haven't heard of her you certainly should find out!

[ansate · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

this exists in some amazing space between Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut.

[gbill_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

‘The Hearing Trumpet’ reads like wild, feminist, apocalyptic fiction, or a surreal painting of another kind by artist Leonora Carrington. It starts off easily enough, as a very old woman with a hearing problem is marginalized by her son and his family, and then put away into a nursing home. The voice of this narrator is excellent, with little touches of wit and the perspective of someone whose mind is alive and well, and yet is misunderstood by everyone except her friend. The lady enters the home and finds others with various outlooks and intrigues, as well as an old painting of a mischievous looking nun, which Carrington then uses to create a ‘story within a story’ midway through the book. The nun puts up a good impression of being devout, but is in reality a believer in a fusion of all sorts of ancient mythologies and fantasies. As the book returns to the original, outer story, it becomes increasingly fantastical and ends in a crescendo of trippy, creative imagining.

It seems to me Carrington’s point is first and foremost feminist. Confining the old woman to the rigid boundaries and idiotic rules of the nursing home, seems to symbolize women being ‘put in their place’, and indeed, Carrington was not a fan of being shut in and contained throughout her life. Carrington also makes the point that men have dominated, making war on each other and inventing the atomic bomb. About Christianity, she asks “why was Eve blamed for everything?” and wonders “how their angry and vicious God became so popular”. In the apocalypse that mysteriously happens, she seems to be pointing out a need to return to more ancient, maternal ways, those connected with the natural Earth and universe.

I liked the book, but the combination of blending and warping mythological references, most of which were over my head, and the almost fairy tale like elements towards the end were just a bit too much for me to give it a higher rating.

[bness2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Like her paintings, this story is a surrealistic fantasy. It starts fairly normally as a story of an aging woman who is being shuffled off to an old people's home and gradually veers off into the fantastic. What is most delightful about the book is the witty voice of the main character, who is the narrator of the story. The ending is utterly unexpected and trippy.

[bookwomble · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Hearing Trumpet starts off as a light-heartedly humerous "batty old bag" kind of a story about a 92 year old woman, Marian Leatherby, and her rather unpleasant (or, at least, unsympathetic) family, who want to ship her off to a home for senile women, as they find her absent-minded wanderings something of an inconvenience and an embarrassment.

Once arrived at the institution run by the Well of Light Brotherhood ("financed by a prominent American cereal company"), things take a darker and more unusual turn. The Brotherhood is run on a strictly-observed religious regimine that seeks to elevate its members to enlightenment through a process of taking their money and enforced frugality. According to Ali Smith in her introduction to the edition I have, the head of the Brotherhood, Dr. Gambit, is based upon [author:G.I. Gurdjieff|214546], and Gambit's frequent references to "The Work" and exhortations to be "self-remembering" do seem to point in Gurdjieff's direction.

The middle section is a fairly long recitation from a manuscript of the doings of the patron saint of the brotherhood, Doña Rosalinda Alvarez Cruz della Cueva, who is portrayed by the Christian writer of the imagined manuscript as an evil witch, who we later find is a 'witch', and also an aspect of the tripartite Goddess of Celtic mythology.

There are links to alchemy through the image of the Hermaphrodite; to the tarot through the image of the Blasted Tower; to Celtic Arthurian mythology and Christian Gnosticism through the image of the Grail; and to Millenial prophecy through the coming of the End Times in the form of global and spiritual catastrophe, all mixed together through the account of an almost certainly unrealiable narrator.

The Hearing Trumpet has flavours that put me in mind of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem and The White Dominican, but Carrington uses her own recipe rather than following that of others.

Throughout the book, there are plenty of endearing and eccentric characters (I'm slightly in love with Carmella Velasquez!), as well as appallingly eccentric ones, waspish humour and deadly machinations. I've shied away from using the adjective 'surreal', as Carrington was a talented surrealist artist and it seems too easy and lazy a word to throw in, but there it is - there is defnitely a building up of surreal elements as the story progresses, but not, I think, simply for stylistic effect. I look forward to re-reading the book and unpeeling its layers.

[michael5rimmer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Hearing Trumpet starts off as a light-heartedly humerous "batty old bag" kind of a story about a 92 year old woman, Marian Leatherby, and her rather unpleasant (or, at least, unsympathetic) family, who want to ship her off to a home for senile women, as they find her absent-minded wanderings something of an inconvenience and an embarrassment.

Once arrived at the institution run by the Well of Light Brotherhood ("financed by a prominent American cereal company"), things take a darker and more unusual turn. The Brotherhood is run on a strictly-observed religious regimine that seeks to elevate its members to enlightenment through a process of taking their money and enforced frugality. According to Ali Smith in her introduction to the edition I have, the head of the Brotherhood, Dr. Gambit, is based upon [author:G.I. Gurdjieff|214546], and Gambit's frequent references to "The Work" and exhortations to be "self-remembering" do seem to point in Gurdjieff's direction.

The middle section is a fairly long recitation from a manuscript of the doings of the patron saint of the brotherhood, Doña Rosalinda Alvarez Cruz della Cueva, who is portrayed by the Christian writer of the imagined manuscript as an evil witch, who we later find is a 'witch', and also an aspect of the tripartite Goddess of Celtic mythology.

There are links to alchemy through the image of the Hermaphrodite; to the tarot through the image of the Blasted Tower; to Celtic Arthurian mythology and Christian Gnosticism through the image of the Grail; and to Millenial prophecy through the coming of the End Times in the form of global and spiritual catastrophe, all mixed together through the account of an almost certainly unrealiable narrator.

The Hearing Trumpet has flavours that put me in mind of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem and The White Dominican, but Carrington uses her own recipe rather than following that of others.

Throughout the book, there are plenty of endearing and eccentric characters (I'm slightly in love with Carmella Velasquez!), as well as appallingly eccentric ones, waspish humour and deadly machinations. I've shied away from using the adjective 'surreal', as Carrington was a talented surrealist artist and it seems too easy and lazy a word to throw in, but there it is - there is defnitely a building up of surreal elements as the story progresses, but not, I think, simply for stylistic effect. I look forward to re-reading the book and unpeeling its layers.

[raketemensch-365457 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The original Latin root for 'obedience' is obaudire. It can be translated as ‘standing by, ready to listen’. Don’t let it fool you, The Hearing Trumpet is drenched in anarchism.

Its timeless rebelliousness appears as matter of fact and is of the healthiest kind: the stabbing social commentary sustains a very low level of venom and the narrator’s tone remains stately even when things get violent (it’s Mrs Carrington's signature trait, I am told). The novel follows the surrealist tradition with grace and without the usual self-indulgence that plagues the art of this variety. It’s all genuine, free-spirited and plain awesome sabbath of the weird; the bizarre imagery bleeds into the book’s reality gradually, in increasingly incisive bursts, but never diminishes the idea behind it. Even the now-familiar White Goddess tropes are delivered with flair and same thing can be said about the amazing finale in which, not to reveal too much, the order of things becomes somewhat re-oriented.

The book is full of brilliantly subtle comic characterizations but one truly unforgettable character is Remedios Varo-inspired Carmella: an avid loud-thinker and a red-wig wearing proto-riot girl in her 80’s. She steals the show every single time she appears.

Wild at heart and weird on top, this endlessly inventive book about elderly ladies has aged much better (if at all) than you’d think surrealist writing could. It may be not exactly my cup of tea but I can recognize a genius when I see one.

Read it and live free or die hard.

[le.vert.galant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Luis Buñuel gets it right: "Reading 'The Hearing Trumpet' liberates us from the miserable reality of our days." This is an amazing and brilliant piece of writing. The pacing is extraordinary. It begins as what seems to be a domestic drama and then expands into a fantastic story. To say more would spoil the impact. My recommendation is to plunge right in and save the introduction until after you've read the novel.

[charlotten_23 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A strange, unlikely tale whose often absurd surrealism exposes the surreal-ness of everyday life. It echoes the absurdism of Eugene Ionesco while somehow making sense of ancient religion. A worthwhile read for anyone who enjoys the darkness of the weird and wonderful.

[cariola_6 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

As I'm not a fan of fantasy or magical realism, this book did little for me--except bore me to tears. The writing itself is fine, and I enjoyed reading the introduction, but that's about all.

[jessqi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This wonderful piece of surrealism is rich in detail and character. It's my favourite book.

[kkisser_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A coven of little old ladies, with the help of a pack of wolves, a nest of bees and a freelance mailman named Taliesin, steel the Holy Grail from the descendants of the Crusaders and return it to the Goddess from whence the Christians stole it in the first place. While illuminating the pagan roots of the Christian Mythology, Leonora Carrington also admonishes the church for its historically cruel treatment of women, especially the elderly variety, as second class citizens. But more then that, Carrington, a surrealist painter and writer, manages to evoke a brilliant sense of dreaminess and real emotion, something conspicuously absent from most surrealist writings. Personally, this is one of my all time favorite books.