The Hearing Trumpet
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4.4 • 17 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher 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.”
Customer Reviews
A Shamanic Experience!
I had the great good fortune to read this book without expectations. I actually thought it was a contemporary novel (I heard the tail end of a conversation about it on NPR, and, as I was looking for a good book, I bought it and dived right in).
I loved it from the first page! And I had no idea the thrill of the upcoming ride through the rest of the pages ! It was hilarious and literary and maddening and surprising and very very satisfying. It chased me to the internet more than once for research, and even that was delicious.
This is my favorite read so far of this century. ADVICE: Don’t read ahead about the author. Read the book; enjoy the surrealistic romp. Then allow yourself the pleasure of looking her up later. “Ah!” you’ll say. “That makes sense."
Get ready for the ride of a lifetime!
Maddeningly fascinating! Impossible to categorize much less explain but it has its own logic and is exhilarating to follow that without expecting explanations. The afterword is helpful in that resoect but don’t read it first!