3.5
The Hearing Trumpet
ByPublisher Description
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.”
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.”
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Hearing Trumpet Reviews
3.5
“A surrealist witchy Gothic eccentric story of old ladies in the strangest home for old ladies. It explores themes related to making fun of religion and patriarchy. There are gender fluid characters. I enjoyed this very very much but I think I adore her other novel The Stone Door even more which is a WAY more surreal and bizarre book than this one. And this one is STRANGE. It defies categotizton. I guess some would call it fantasy. Most people prefer The Hearing Trumpet because it is easier to digest than The Stone Door. I think they are both amazing works of literature. I am just drawn more to the even more exteme weirdness and uniqueness of The Stone Door.”
“What a terrifically strange book. I think I enjoyed it”
““People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats”
Delightful and surprising.”
About Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was born in England and spent most of her adult life in Mexico City, where she participated in the Surrealist movement as an artist, painter, and novelist. NYRB Classics published her memoir Down Below and a collection of her illustrated stories for children, The Milk of Dreams, in 2017.
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.
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.
Other books by Leonora Carrington
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