I couldn't tell you what I was expecting, but I guarantee it wasn't any of this. Delightful and funny and ridiculous. ( )

Leonora Carrington is typically identified with the Surrealist movement, and her novel The Hearing Trumpet does reflect on the exoteric aspects of that school briefly (66). But the book engages and parodies many esoteric currents, from Gurdjieffianism to alchemy to Neo-Templarism to witchcraft. The story is an initiatory drama like that of Andreae's Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, and Carrington's protagonist analogous to CRC is the 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, whose deafness is overcome by the implement of the book's title at the outset of the tale.

Although the word "Mexico" does not appear in the text, the story does evidently take place there, reflecting both the author's frequent and sustained residence there (where she eventually died in 1911) but also her English background and cosmopolitanism. There is a great amount of genuine comedy throughout, rising gradually from the introspective to the eschatological. The narrative vector is, now that I think of it, rather like that of Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.

The book is short and fast-moving. I found the reading experience similar to other surrealist novels--in the generic rather than the partisan sense--I have read in recent years, such as O'Brien's Third Policeman and Lem's Manuscript Found in a Bathtub. I suspect that it shares with the latter an indebtedness to Potocki's Manuscript found in Saragossa.

The text is accompanied by about a dozen of the author's own illustrations, of which the originals were evidently in pen and ink. These lend a further energy to the story. They are faithful to the words, without adding much additional meaning, although sometimes bringing out narrative implications in stark relief.

My copy is the Penguin Modern Classics edition with a 2005 introduction by Ali Smith. Those unfamiliar with Carrington's rather amazing biography can benefit from this front matter. While Smith praises the novel and provides a high-level gloss of its plot and themes, she does little interpretive work on a text that speaks so crisply for itself.

So much fun. Reminds me of Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Warner, except significantly more wild. It's a novel that constantly is upending its own narrative expectations--it's a humorous meditation on aging and ageism that becomes a gothic romance which becomes a magical realist murder mystery which becomes an apocalypse which becomes a founding of a new kind of world and a restoration of a different kind of religion. Does that mean that there's bunch of narrative threads which don't end up going anywhere? Yeah. But it also is an enormous rollicking adventure of a book that's often delightful.
I do wish it were less essentialist in its understandings of gender, and there's some racist depictions of characters of color that are uncomfortable at best. Like a lot of work by white cis women at this time, it comes very close to some really big ideas, but is hampered in its execution by the author's own paradigms. ( )

For some reason this one painting really speaks to me:
Leonora Carrington, The Temptation of St. Anthony (1945)

Carrington is a visual artist as well as an author. Like [a:Mervyn Peake|22018|Mervyn Peake|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1341040504p2/22018.jpg], her artistic sensibilities are evident through her writing; essentially The Hearing Trumpet is as much a dadaist painting as it is a novel. It can be effectively divided into three parts each getting progressively more bizarre. The first is when the old woman is consigned to a nursing home, the second is the strange plot around the two psychic murderesses and the mystery of the winking Abbess, and the third is the supernatural cosmic winter the world is plunged into after the apparent triumph of the Venus cult. Throughout it the lead character and her compatriots, all elderly women, gain more and more freedom and vitality. They start the book as not just prisoners of their husbands and sons who shunt them aside but also of their own frail bodies. They end the book as masters of a surreal new realm. Carrington suggests that the patriarchy (never directly identified as such) is a cosmic mistake, the result of the sons of Adam stealing a chalice from the goddess Venus. Neglected old women in a remote nursing home unleash a winged beast to right this historical wrong and "sow panic among the nations." In the process the world tilts, the poles shift places, tropical birds languish confused on a snowy landscape, and whimsy reigns supreme.

Edit: My only real frustration in this book is the presence of a character that can only be described uncharitably as a Magical Negress. It would fit the genre and be less demeaning if that character were a figure in a dream, or a gust of wind, or a talking swan. Oh well, it's just one sour note at the symphony. ( )

I find it difficult to express how much I enjoyed this book. It has ignited a passion and hyperfixation for surrealism and surrealist and absurdist literature I am about to absolutely dive headfirst into. I devoured the audiobook in two sittings, staying up until gone 0400 and putting it on being the first thing I did this morning because this books is mesmerising!

Giving the overview of a surrealist story is always incredibly lacklustre, but here goes: An old lady with diminished hearing is gifted an ear trumpet with which she hears her family planning to ship her off to a facility for senile old women. She travels to the facility and is forced to join in the bizarre activities and strict esoteric form of Christianity. Friends and enemies are made. A history of an abess who quested for Holy Grail is recounted. Someone dies in suspicious circumstances and many of the ladies band together in protest. Things get very strange with a tower, riddles, a new age, geography and werewolves.

The above doesn't really spoil anything and absolutely doesn't do the book justice. I am a not even a novice when it comes to the surreal, though I have admired it and the Dada movement from afar for many years and only now really venturing into the literature, so I have no idea what to say. I just know that it was weird and wonderful. It is so rare to see old ladies presented with such character and agency, and I look forward to exploring what much more learned people have to say about it.

There are a few phrases regarding race that have not aged well. They do not seem to contain malice, though this absolutely not my place to say, and appear to be a vernacular of the time. However, this doesn't make them right to be used and shouldn't be ignored in a contemporary reading.

I listened to the great amateur recording of the book narrated by D J Elliott: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmZPvb_2WrJ6oT1CK0QpMcYVriJQSH4TT&si=mcod...

***Minor Spoiler***

As a transfemme, I'm particularly interested in the character of Maud/ Arthur. While assumptions are given by one character as to why she came to be at the facility, I believe Maud can be read as a trans character, especially with her only being presented and discussed as a woman by herself and others until the end. I don't really know what to say about it, beyond that I like this as a headcanon and hope the discussion in the book isn't triggering for any trans folx who also read Maud this way. ( )