paperback, 224 pages
Published Jan. 5, 2021 by NYRB Classics.
Leonora Carrington, the distinguished British-born Surrealist painter 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.
I want all of my freak friends to read this and start an apocalypse coven with me when we’re 90-years-old!
Quite disappointing, especially considering that I loved the first third of this book. Everything afterward dulled me out to no end.
An altogether wonderful book. Mad, eccentric, funny, feminist, mordant, oneiric, hallucinatory, biting, apocalyptic, quotidian, a tale of the forgotten and neglected and the werewolves, spirits, and self-devourers at the end of the world. Also an eccentric old woman with a hearing trumpet and the odd characters in the nursing home to which her ungrateful family sends her. And then there's this portrait on the wall of Dona Rosalinda Alvarez Cruz della Cueva, a most unusual nun...
So, yes, not a good idea to try to summarize, but you should absolutely read it!
Don't skip the afterword!
Extraordinary madness, inventiveness, meandering senile minds - our narrator is perhaps the least paranoid and babbling of the bunch, or is she? Exactly as if one of Carrington's expansive paintings were put to motion and interrogation.
This started well, but dragged on and ended up as an essentially random sequence of occurrences. I am disappointed.
