can hardly be classified as a human being,” complains her grandson. When Marian’s friend and neighbor, Carmella, gifts her a hearing trumpet-a device that allows Marian to eavesdrop on faraway conversations-she overhears her family’s plot to institutionalize her. Marian Leatherby, the novel’s narrator, is a ninety-two-year-old woman who lives with her son and his family. In The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington leans into her starkest eccentricities, depicting the subversive power of womanhood with more imaginative zeal than almost any other 20 th century novelist. Carrington’s paintings and writings from this time often emphasized her eccentric relationship with reality, wedding magical realism and memoir, femininity and mythology, isolation and collectivism. We should be grateful: her institutional evasion led to some of her most interesting work. Upon release, her parents intended to send her to a sanatorium in South Africa, but Carrington escaped to Mexico, where she lived the rest of her life. I was horrified by my own power.” In Madrid, her state worsened, and she was admitted to an asylum. Traveling from France to Spain by car, Carrington experienced a wave of psychosis: “I was the car. The German Army had sent her lover-the Surrealist artist Max Ernst-to a concentration camp, and a friend convinced Carrington that she should flee to avoid detainment. As the Nazis invaded France, Leonora Carrington suffered a mental breakdown.
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