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. ( )

For 'crone' in Into the Forest group challenge. I probably won't like it, but I'll give it a good go.

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. ( )

What a delightful, magical, and unexpectedly apocalyptic tale of a 92 year old woman whose family put her in an old people’s home. Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington’s writing is deft, mysterious, and extremely funny. I was reminded of [b:Lolly Willowes|937105|Lolly Willowes|Sylvia Townsend Warner|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320554609s/937105.jpg|922084] and [b:Two Serious Ladies|215262|Two Serious Ladies |Jane Bowles|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1172774282s/215262.jpg|208395], in which women considered excess to requirements by their families also rebel against the situation. ‘The Hearing Trumpet’ abounds with beautiful imagery, deadpan humour, and a sense of magical possibility that make it a joy to read. The edition I read also features charmingly unsettling illustrations. The narrator Marian Leatherby is a definite role model. I also loved her hyperbole-prone friend Carmella, as well as the other inhabitants of the institution in which Marian finds herself. The dialogue is very entertaining, for example:

Georgina suddenly stared curiously at my crochet scarf. “Talking of animals, is that a jerkin for a grass snake that you are knitting?” Georgina could hardly be expected to guess it was a scarf. Still it was obvious that I was doing crochet work, not knitting.
“No.” I said slightly nettled. ”It is not.”
“Where did you get such nauseatingly green wool? It makes my dentures chatter.”
“There are times when you are far too critical, Georgina. Maude Somers very kindly made me the present of this nice green wool, and I think it has a very pleasant springtime colour, like early chestnut leaves.”
“I hope you don’t intend to wear it eventually?” said Georgina, ignoring my reproach. “You would look like Noah after he was drowned in the flood. Green is not your colour, you are far too green as it is.”
“Surely you don’t expect me to look like a debutante?” I asked. “Besides Noah was not supposed to have drowned. He had an ark, you know, full of animals.”
“Everybody knows that the whole bible is inaccurate. True, Noah did go off in an ark, but he got drunk and fell overboard. Mrs. Noah went aft and watched him drown, she didn’t do anything about it because she inherited all those cattle. People in the bible were very sordid and a lot of cattle in those days was like a bank account.”
Georgina got up and threw her cigarette end into the bee pond, it fizzled unpleasantly.
“Where are you going?” I asked, as I always enjoyed Georgina’s conversation.
“I am going to read a novel so can go knitting your beastly sock.” She stalked off with a certain creaking elegance, leaving a faint scent behind her that reminded me of rue de la Paix.

Although I found the central section about the mysterious Abbess a little too long, I have no other quibbles with this enchanting book. The sudden escalation of events in the final sixty pages was quite simply brilliant. ’Friendship, solidarity, and black magic amongst old women faced with a new ice age’ deserves to be a much more popular theme for fiction. ( )

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. ( )

I appreciated what the book was doing but also it never really connected with me fully. I'm going to blame some of this on being autistic. The book needs you to appreciate a lot of different surrealistic and dream like connections and I mostly just... Didn't feel it.

Stuff that I enjoyed: the few illustrations are all absolutely amazing. Although the book didn't have a normal plot structure the very last line was kind of a beautiful shaggy dog like resolution and I always appreciate those. And the general concept of writing from the perspective of an elderly lady who may well be senile but still is her own strong character and deserves better than where society wants to place her is great - I did pretty consistently enjoy having her as the narrator.

I think the big thing is that part way through the book shifts to a pretty surreal mode. Which is understandable given the author was a member of the Surrealist International. It's not out of left field - there's enough stuff from early on that hints at it - but it does sort of end the development of all the characters introduced and completely departs from even a hint at the real life issues of age and womanhood and institutionalisation that the first part seemed very concerned with. It also starts by sort of appearing to be more of a mystery where thing will be explained to some extent - they're not but that's fine.

It's just for me personally none of the more symbolic and more magic stuff landed at all. One of the bits is personal around trans stuff - it wasn't offensive exactly just when the book is playing with symbols and womanhood it felt... You know one of the characters in the all woman old people home is revealed to have a penis after she dies. It's not handled sensitively but it's not offensive, more a curiosity that she decided to live her senior years as a woman in a care home. But given that this event seems to kickstart the womanly renewal of the rest of the inhabitants it feels like... Hmm. I see.

There's some strange race issues - the setting is somewhere in Spanish speaking Americas but most of the inhabitants of the care home including the narrator appear to be Europeans. Except for one slightly more mysterious and mystical character who is referred to as... "A Negress". I can assume that was a translation issue, I guess. It feels strange symbolically that a book that focuses on a sort of mystical liberation for old women in the Americas is so tied to Europe, including mythologically.

After I wrote this i realised that the ending surreal section is clearly a strangely optimistic reading of nuclear winter which I'm not sure makes me like it more - I just felt I recognised the symbolism and it was bad - but definitely makes it more interesting than I originally thought ( )

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. ( )

Sure, it's weird and creative and there are some interesting parts but, much like my response to most surrealist paintings, having finished it I just kinda ask.....but why though??

January 2022
Driving FEE Amarillo to Green River
Audio/ Libby
Goodreads Recommendation ( )

Surreale, irriverente, improbabile, divertente.
Non è il mio genere ma mi è piaciuto. ( )

What few paintings by Carrington I've seen, I've loved. I remember loving this bk too. Very funny &, to slightly mutate a word on its back cover, PHANTASMAGORIC. If she ever wrote anything else & I were to find a copy, I'd read it. ( )

I found parts of this very funny and it started off strong. Somewhere towards the middle when she reads the diary and then throws herself in a pot of soup it goes way off rails and I lost interest. I did finish it as I listened to the audiobook and the narrator was fantastic. As well, it fulfilled a requirement on the Read Harder challenge and it was short. I don't know that I would read anything else by the author though. ( )

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. ( )

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 ( )

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. ( )

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! ( )

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'. ( )

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! ( )

Dit wonderlijke,surrealistische en magische verhaal is geestig op een bijzondere manier. Het intermezzo – het boek over de Lonkende non – geeft het verhaal een bijzondere, metafysische wending, maar aan het einde valt alles op zijn plaats. Met haar formidabele verbeeldingskracht weet Carrington met haar verhalen te betoveren. ( )

This one is a wild ride. From quirky to surreal and back again. I need to re-read the story within the story because I don't think I really "got" it but everything else was just wonderfully weird and fun. The characters are funny and Marian especially has such a great voice and I loved the way they everybody more or less went along with what was happening without much complaint. A really great book. ( )

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! ( )

🤔So, in this book . . . 🤔. Imagine that a surrealist painter wrote a book and you've pretty much got this book. The story revolves around an older woman who is sent to live in a home run by religious fanatics that has a history with a witch/nun. I've seen many reviews that say it highlights feminist issues, but I didn't see that. The story slows in the middle with the nun's backstory, and it really wanders off into myths and legends at the end. ( )