Surreal and splendidly unconventional, The Hearing Trumpet is an apocalyptic fairy tale quest about an occult old ladies' home and the spry nonagenarian who ends up there.
After coming into possession of a hearing trumpet, 92-year-old Marian Leatherby discovers her son's plans to send her to a nursing home. But this is no ordinary place.... Here there are strange rituals, orgiastic nuns, levitating abbesses, animalistic humans, humanistic animals, a search for the Holy Grail, and a plan to escape to Lapland and knit a tent.
Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington's novel is an exhilarating journey brimming with laugh-out-loud humor and absurd lunacy.
Mary Leonora Carrington (6 April 1917 – 25 May 2011) was a British-born, naturalized Mexican surrealist painter and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
Carrington's work is identified and compared with the surrealist movement. Within the surrealist movement, there was a strong exploration of the woman's body combined with the mysterious forces of nature. During this time women artists correlated the feminine figure with creative nature while using ironic stances. When painting, Carrington used small brushstroke techniques building up layers in a meticulous manner, creating rich imagery.
Her book The Hearing Trumpet deals with ageing and the female body. It follows the story of older women who, in the words of Madeleine Cottenet-Hage in her essay "The Body Subversive: Corporeal Imagery in Carrington, Prassinos and Mansour", seek to destroy the institutions of their imaginative society to usher in a "spirit of sisterhood." The Hearing Trumpet also criticizes the shaming of the nude female body, and it is believed to be one of the first books to tackle the notion of gender identity in the twentieth century.
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