Leonora Carrington - Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland: Alchemy is as attainable and delicious as tinned sardines & personality is a vampyre

Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet, Exact Change, 2004.

"Leonora Carrington, the distinguished British-born Surrealist painter who now makes her home in Mexico City, is also a writer of extraordinary imagination and charm. Exact Change launched a program of reprinting her fiction with what is perhaps her best loved book. The Hearing Trumpet is the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that what her family is saying is that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is open. It is also the scene of a mysterious murder. Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, The Hearing Trumpet is a classic of fantastic literature that has been translated and celebrated throughout the world."

"This week’s question asked what the most unusal book we’ve read was. I’ve read a lot of books that are outside my comfort zone, but the most memorable one was Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. Carrington is a surrealist painter who utilized her ideas about art to portray a similar effect in her writing. It’s a very original piece about a woman who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet and when she can finally hear what her family is saying, she realizes they want to put her in a nursing home. Once she gets there, however, she finds that it is not an ordinary nursing home, and the tale of what happens at the nursing home begins to get very incredible (to start, the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos). It’s a fun and impertinent book, unique and well written." - americanbibliophile.com

"...As for her novel, it's every bit as original and astounding as her life seems to have been. It's hard to pin down its charm to any one factor - the sideways wit that propels memorable bon mots as wise and unexpected in their own way as the paradoxes of Wilde, the boundless, unconventional imagination that takes us from a sinister home for elderly women to Grail-chasing intrigue in the 18th century to the next Ice Age and beyond - the narrative voice, that of an incredibly ancient, somewhat doddering but definitely alert and irreverent old woman (one wonders if Carrington was anticipating her own older self) or the somewhat breathtaking vision of personal and global transformation that underpins the whole work.
This novel was a study in the unexpected for me - from the gradual opening-out of scales that takes us from an admittedly unusual old woman's senescent musings to the end of the world as we know it as well as for the unexpected delight of finding something so funny, wise, smart, weird and magnificent by someone I'd never heard of before." - Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

"There have been, to my knowledge, only two novels that have been written by English women surrealists; and I can now proudly boast that I have read them both. The first such novel is Goose of Hermogenes (subtitled “A Gothick Fantasy”) by Ithell Colquhoun, which is a strangely haunting and hallucinogenic work. Each chapter takes its title from a stage in the alchemical process of the Great Work (e.g., the first chapter is entitled “Calcination”), and taken as a whole the novel is a kind of allegory of the spiritual journey. (In actual life, by the way, Ithell Colquhoun’s own journey eventually led to her becoming a Priestess of Isis.) The second such novel, written during the 1960s and originally published in France in 1974, is The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington; and it has just been published as a Penguin Classic.
The Hearing Trumpet is fantastic, full of wit and (as one might expect) rather surreal; but it is also an unusual, offbeat exploration of old age and of a world gone awry. The story concerns Marian Leatherby, an energetic lady of 92 years of age, who receives the gift of a hearing trumpet from her family on the eve of being sent away to a care home. The care home is a curious institution, for within its grounds are buildings that are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, and there is an open gateway to the underworld. A winking nun called Rosalinda is the presiding presence of the home, and a tractate telling her tale appears within the novel itself.
Carrington’s intelligence and invention is an ambient presence in the novel, a motor’s hum in the background. She makes us aware that old age, like childhood, may be a state of powerlessness; but (also like childhood) it is a state of grace too. She shows us an old woman who is besieged by memories, but still alive to the beauty of the world. For Marian may take pains to seem to be as she believes the powerful want to see her (an amusement in itself), but one of her great frustrations lies in writing poetry. To her, “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 neatly together without looking in shop windows.”
There are wonderful flights of fancy throughout, as when Marion’s friend Carmella fantasises about “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.” Or as when Marion, confronted with her double (or rather, her own self) asks, “Which of us is really me?”
The humour is at its strongest when it mixes the exotic with the homely. At one point Marlborough, a kind of latter-day Noah, says of his sisters, one of whom is a werewolf who comes to mate with a wolf, that “when I crossed half the world to visit them in their respective castles, …my journeys were made with the object of stealing an early model vacuum cleaner which they were in the habit of loaning out to each other at exorbitant prices.”
Marian’s old age is mirrored by an atrophy of the earth, with an atomic war leading to an ecological collapse. Yet perhaps this is her delusion and the emerging apocalypse is simply a vision of how the world appears to the dying?
The Hearing Trumpet is an enchanting, engaging addition to fantastic literature, by Lancashire’s greatest surrealist." - Paul Kane

"Leonora Carrington is probably best known as a surrealist painter, and that is undoubtedly a shame if "The Hearing Trumpet" is anything to go by. A more delightful book is difficult to imagine.
One way to describe it would be as a Roald Dahl take on a Miss Marple mystery. Still it would be a way off. For Dahl would have to be informed by a grown woman's point of view - and that point of view would have to take in account the truly surreal life of Carrinton.
Whether or not, the young Leonora snipped her guests hair while they were asleep in order to serve them omelets stuffed with their clippings for breakfast, is truly besides the point. If she didn't actually do it, she at least thought of the prank which is too surreal for words.
Geographical constraints aside, her nanny is also supposed to have rescued her from a Madrid asylum where the young british debutant had been institutionalized (after a short-lived marriage with Max Ernst), by way of submarine. Once again Si non è vero è ben trovato.
"The Hearing Trumpet" has that cosy feeling only the british seem to get across with the surrealist touch of magic and color that one can't help but believe is consequence of Carrington's adopted country, Mexico.
Our narrator is an extremely lucid and good-natured, ninety-two-year-old. Marian Leatherby is perfectly content in the back room and garden of her son and his wife's home where she keeps two cats and two chickens and looks at the moon. Often she vists her friend Carmella, a sophisticaded mature woman who wears day-glow wigs and writes letters to people she chooses out of a phone directory (and is truly amazed they never write back, a surrealist at heart).
Marian's only handicap is that she is stone-deaf which most of the time does not take any pleasure out of her days. Unfortunately her son, and most importantly his wife, seem to find her an embarrasment, and her grandson agrees.
Petit-bourgeois that they are they take offence at the sight of old-age, and the fact that Marian has a beard doens't much help; neither does the fact that she likes to tell their dinner guests stories which, more often than not, lack a clear narrative line.
When Carmella presents Marian with a huge hearing trumpet, her deafness is solved. However, the first thing she hears is her family conspiring to put her away in an asylum.
Carmella takes her cats, and the maid the chickens (less fortunate) and off Marian goes to a surrealist asylum if there ever was one. The director and his wife seem to be involved in some sort of new-age cult the exact dogma of which is never very clear. The only thing required, besides some truly strange gymnastics, is for the women (it is a female asylum) to conform, forget about humour, curiosity and of course, voicing an opinion ("Personality is a vampyre", Dr Gambit avows). If however, one can feign a spritual connection to the other world as one of the women does, one is in the clear.
The women live in bungalows shaped as boots, cuckoo clocks, mushrooms, birthday cakes, igloos, circus tents and lighthouses. However the asylum used to be a catholic convent, and a strange portrait of a winking nun faces Marian everyday at dinner.
The story of Doña Rosalinda Alvarez della Cueva takes up part of the book, by means of a journal passed on to Marian, just as events seem to turn the way of a murder mystery: two women conspire to kill a rival (by means of poisoned brownies, how else?) and end up taking the life of another, glutonous woman, who on careful observation is not quite what she seemed.
Amid a mutiny in the asylum, late-night reunions where tribal drums sound, and where the elderly women find themselves compelled to perform strange dances, a strange creature is unleashed from the misterious tower which looks upon the compound.
Marian is led into a basement for a ritual initiaton and an ice-age ensues. It is all good fun, for Carmella arrives in a limousine driven by a chinaman with fur coats for all and an army of cats in tow, while Marian's long estranged friend, Marlbourough, arrives in an ark, straight from Venice, accompanied by his sister, a wolf-faced woman.
It is enough to make one crave for old-age if its going to be half as wonderful.
"The Hearing Trumpet" is a feminine book in which the few male characters are never as interesting as their wifes, mothers or sisters. There is no room for children, Marian's adolescent grandson is an idiot, and the adults tediously conservative, deluded, egocentric and full of their own importance. Only old-age, especially female, grants a magical eye and a colourful disposition, humour and serenity to withstand the adult world's boorishness. Cats abound and a small glass of "portuguese wine" makes everything endurable, especially coupled with a french éclair.
Alchemy is as attainable and delicious as tinned sardines. Wonderful." - bookworm

"If like me, you consider the recent Fantastic Women issue of Tin House the greatest single issue of a literary magazine ever, you'd likely enjoy this reissued novel from a master surrealist painter and writer. I admit I purchased the novel because I momentarily confused Leonora Carrington with Dora Carrington, the painter affiliated with the whole Strachey/Woolf crowd. Instead L. Carrington turned out to also be a painter but affiliated with the whole Ernst/Dali crowd. I also admit I purchased the novel years ago, put it in the laundry basket (it's a nice wicker basket and it's full of books to be laundered, I mean, read) and forgot about it until I was recently perusing the 1001 Paintings to See Before You Die (I'm a sucker for a life list) and came across the wonderful "Baby Giant" by L. Carrington and thought, isn't that on the cover of that book I bought and then buried in the laundry basket... and finally, here we are: I am entranced.
The novel follows a ninety-two year old woman who is dispatched to a nursing home that turns out to be a very peculiar place. The tone is Jane-Bowles-strange and the narrator is a Character with a Capital C and very very funny things happen. Including an interlude in which the narrator reads a book by a winking nun who describes further very funny and very strange happenings (let's just say the Holy Grail is involved).
Capital C Characters are often defined more by their unique thoughts than their unique behaviors, as evidenced by this: "I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway." The not eating meat describes the character, but the reason why defines her.
And should you need further inducement to read, I give you this: "The rest of that ill-omened night was spent burying the Prince in the kitchen garden."
And this: "'A report from Mother Maria Guillerma informed me of the following extravagant occurrence of which she was eyewitness through the ample keyhole of Dona Rosalinda's apartments. The keyholes later on became obscurum per obscurius after two nuns were blinded in one eye by a silver needle poked through the opening by the ever-perspicacious Abbess."
And this: "...then I would join my lifelong dream of going to Lapland to be drawn in a vehicle by dogs, woolly dogs." - A. P. Bucak

"One of the things that I love, on the near never ending list of things I love, about book blogging is that sometimes someone who has been reading your blog a while will recommend you a title that you have never heard of before but instantly sounds up your street. This was the case with ‘The Hearing Trumpet’ by Leonora Carrington, a book both with a title and an author that I had never heard of before and yet instantly appealed to me when I learnt more about it.
Marian Leatherby is given a hearing trumpet from her best friend (and the absolutely wonderful) Carmella. At 92 years of age Marian is living with her son and his family who really don’t want her there and on the first evening she hides away to listen to them all she hears that she is soon to be sent off to a home. Marian is aware that she might not be everyone’s ideal house guest but this is her family and it’s a rejection and an upheaval all in one. Though this book does deal with the pitfalls of old age it is by no means a morose tale, in fact its both giggle inducing and laugh out loud funny on several occasions.
‘Here I may add that I consider 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 anyway discomfort me. I don’t have to bite anybody and there are all sorts of 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.’
She is soon made to pack her bags and is carted off to one of the strangest institutions that there could be. A place where the houses that these old ladies live in are made in the shape of giant shoes, igloo’s, birthday cakes and mushrooms and where their inhabitants are almost as barmy. Marian becomes rather subconsciously obsessed with a painting of a winking Nun, Dona Rosalinda Alvarez Cruz della Cueva, who she soon learns was the founder of the institution with quite a bizarre and sordid past. Throw in a murder and a surreal almost apocalypse and you have one of the most bizarre yet brilliantly funny and original tale.
Discovering that Leonora Carrington was a surrealist painter made a huge amount of sense when I read Ali Smith’s (who I like a lot) introduction to the novel. Carrington paints a setting which is completely cuckoo and yet also vivid and so you can easily picture these ladies heading to their toad-stools and the like after dinner in the grand hall. I will admit towards the end I did get a little bit lost and it took me a little while to realise I was reading a story within a story at another point, yet you do go with it no matter how doolally it gets.
As well as just how surreal it can be Carrington’s characters and humour make this a real pleasure to read in parts. Most of the ladies at the institute be they evil, delightful or a bit racy were really enjoyable to read and spend time with. For me personally Carmella stole every scene she was in and had me in hysterics often for example as she thinks of ways of which to rescue Marian from dressing up as a nun to buying a helicopter, though she would have to win the lottery or marry a millionaire first, and rescuing her from above – in fact everything Carmella thinks and does has to go to the most unexpected of extremes. Marian of course as the narrator was also a joy and her darker wit really appealed to me.
‘I saw myself sitting in a warm parlour with scarlet curtains surrounded by happy, confidential but vague faces. I drank glass after glass of rich Portuguese wine occasionally washed down with a tiny French éclair. Everybody got happier and happier, they burst into applause as I reached the lighthouse, Anna Wertz had disappeared. She must have noticed that I had not been paying attention to what she was telling me. Poor Anna, how terrible for her that nobody ever liked listening to her talk.’
It’s not a perfect book and you might get lost here and there but if you want a highly original book that will have you laughing a lot and you can spend an afternoon with, as its only 144 pages, then I would highly recommend this be a read for you. I really enjoyed my time with it, and was very grateful for the recommendation which I am now passing on to all of you. A crazy old tale filled with crazy old ladies… lovely stuff!
Have any of you spent time with Marian Leatherby? I would love to know what others have made of this book. Do any of you know if there is a book about Leonora Carrington as reading the introduction and hearing about her escapades if there isn’t a book about her then there should be! Has anyone read anything else by Leonora Carrington? What’s the most surreal book you have picked up lately?" - savidgereads.wordpress.com

Read it at Google Books