‘People under Seventy and Over Seven Are Very Unreliable if They Are not Cats’
CARRINGTON, Leonora. The Hearing Trumpet. London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1977.
8vo. Original green cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust-jacket illustrated by Pablo Weisz-Carrington, priced £3.50 net to the front flap; a bright, fine copy, in like wrapper.
A fine first edition, first impression of ‘one of the most original, joyful, satisfying, and quietly visionary novels of the twentieth century’.
British-born painter and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is one of a handful of artists to be equally valued for her visual and literary works. Part of the original wave of surrealism in the 1930s (and sometime lover of Max Ernst), she spent much of her life in Mexico; her paintings are highly and increasingly esteemed both critically and commercially, but it is her small body of writings, and The Hearing Trumpet in particular, that have quietly established themselves as minor masterpieces.
It is unclear when she wrote the novel. Some think it was written in Mexico City in the early 1960s, while others believe it was completed the previous decade; the jacket of this edition was designed by the author’s son. The précis on the dust-jacket gives an idea of its strange and mercurial world. Narrated by the ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby, ‘inmate of an old ladies’ home haunted by occult doctrines and poisonings and administered by the pedantic Dr Gambit, [she] discovers the secret of the Leering Abbess and the Holy Grail, and one of the old ladies is accidentally killed. When the women rise up in a feminist cabal to save themselves from their ‘protectors’ they unwittingly set off an upheaval of cosmic proportions.’
The Hearing Trumpet was, for many years, lost. Its first appearance, in 1974, was in French translation, the original English version following three years later. Once a closely guarded secret (a cult book), the novel, described by Ali Smith as ‘[o]ne of the most original, joyful, satisfying and quietly visionary novels of the twentieth century’, is now a classic.
SKU: 2125160