She must have been a remarkable woman,” she dreams.

“The fact that the snooping priest…had done his best to portray her in a pernicious light, hardly distorted the purity of her original image. In this text within a text, Celtic goddesses and Greek deities flicker through the zoetrope of Carrington’s rotating allusions. The leather-bound manuscript was slipped to Marian by a co-conspiring neighbor, and we read it alongside Marian, from start to finish, digesting the words of a snooping priest who’s responsible for these documentations-and judgments-of the abbess’s romps.

Stories build within stories within stories allusions layer over one another. If she were still alive and a Lightsome Hall resident, the abbess would certainly be labeled a “Deficient Personality.” The thirty-plus pages of her racy tale, sandwiched in the middle of the book, are arguably the novel’s most vertiginous. Her sleuthing reveals the abbess’s raucous life of hunting the holy grail, and the creaky nonagenarian jumps to pursue the same chase. It is here-amongst buildings shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, poisoned-fudge schemes, and “objective observation of Personality”-that Marian discovers a leering abbess’s old portrait. She’s pushed out to Lightsome Hall, a peculiar institute with a despotic pseudo-guru as head doctor. With the gift of a Jacobean hearing trumpet, “grandly curved like a buffalo’s horn,” Marian unveils her family’s plot to put her in a retirement home for women. She dreams of dogsledding in Lapland and often preoccupies herself with pondering the Snow Queen. Marian is shrewd, if not slightly senile: a grey-bearded nonagenarian who’s hard of hearing and curved with rheumatism. At the center is Marian Leatherby-a knightly hero on a quest for the holy grail. Greek myths, Celtic legends, and classic fairy tales all sit in one another like never-ending nesting dolls. But it’s the comic novel The Hearing Trumpet (NYRB), first published in 1974 and reissued this year, that dizzies with the vastness of Carrington’s storytelling. In each, there’s an oozing sense of the uncanny-more haunting than quirky. Both eventually became subjects of Carrington’s morbid wit.Ĭarrington’s work spans across a multitude of genres: paintings, sculptures, plays, short stories, novels, a memoir. Male Surrealists crooned adulations of the femme-enfant’s purity, counting on her submission. Carrington’s father deemed her deranged, locking Carrington in a mental institution. Throughout Leonora Carrington’s life, the British-Mexican surrealist faced numerous attempts to banish and define her. Reclaiming the story demands more than just rejecting the other versions: it must be retold altogether. Hell is the place where others have written your story for you.

The hearing trumpet