The Hearing Trumpet

It made me laugh so many times. I'd be reading away with a small smile when something so ridiculous, so unexpected, would be so delightfully funny that I'd laugh out loud.

Marian Leatherby is 92 and has been living with her son and daughter-in-law for the last fifteen years. She's almost deaf, so she can't hear what her family is saying about her until her friend Carmella gives her a hearing trumpet. Carmella is a wonderful character, as are Marian and all the other old ladies in this book.

Weird things happen. Wait till you find out what happened to the leering nun whose portrait overlooks the dining table.

I don't usually read Fantasy, but I loved this book.

This is a wild and wonderful fable about some amazing old ladies! It begins when Marian Leatherby’s friend Carmella gives her a hearing trumpet, so that she is now able to hear that her family is sending her to an old folks home. But what an old folks home it is! The residents are housed in a strange array of concrete outbuildings that I visualized as a giant miniature golf course. And that’s before things get weird.

“All this is a digression and I do not wish anyone to think my mind wanders far, it wanders but never further than I want.”

Toss in the venal New Age-y owners of the nursing home who encourage residents to do the Work of Self Remembering, a cast of whacky old women, a winking Abbess, the Knights Templar, the Holy show more Grail, and even more progressively surreal events, and it’s like Foucault’s Pendulum in Wonderland, only hilarious.

“One would not have expected these kinds of problems in a home for senile old ladies.” Indeed. show less

The Hearing Trumpet starts off as a light-heartedly humerous "batty old bag" kind of a story about a 92 year old woman, Marian Leatherby, and her rather unpleasant (or, at least, unsympathetic) family, who want to ship her off to a home for senile women, as they find her absent-minded wanderings something of an inconvenience and an embarrassment.

Once arrived at the institution run by the Well of Light Brotherhood ("financed by a prominent American cereal company"), things take a darker and more unusual turn. The Brotherhood is run on a strictly-observed religious regimine that seeks to elevate its members to enlightenment through a process of taking their money and enforced frugality. According to Ali Smith in her introduction to the show more edition I have, the head of the Brotherhood, Dr. Gambit, is based upon G.I. Gurdjieff, and Gambit's frequent references to "The Work" and exhortations to be "self-remembering" do seem to point in Gurdjieff's direction.

The middle section is a fairly long recitation from a manuscript of the doings of the patron saint of the brotherhood, Doña Rosalinda Alvarez Cruz della Cueva, who is portrayed by the Christian writer of the imagined manuscript as an evil witch, who we later find is a 'witch', and also an aspect of the tripartite Goddess of Celtic mythology.

There are links to alchemy through the image of the Hermaphrodite; to the tarot through the image of the Blasted Tower; to Celtic Arthurian mythology and Christian Gnosticism through the image of the Grail; and to Millenial prophecy through the coming of the End Times in the form of global and spiritual catastrophe, all mixed together through the account of an almost certainly unrealiable narrator.

The Hearing Trumpet has flavours that put me in mind of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem and The White Dominican, but Carrington uses her own recipe rather than following that of others.

Throughout the book, there are plenty of endearing and eccentric characters (I'm slightly in love with Carmella Velasquez!), as well as appallingly eccentric ones, waspish humour and deadly machinations. I've shied away from using the adjective 'surreal', as Carrington was a talented surrealist artist and it seems too easy and lazy a word to throw in, but there it is - there is defnitely a building up of surreal elements as the story progresses, but not, I think, simply for stylistic effect. I look forward to re-reading the book and unpeeling its layers. show less

Wonderfully weird tale of a very old woman consigned to a fantastical facility, the people she encounters there, and the adventures they have. It's full of strong-willed characters navigating old age and a very strange universe. Carrington's writing here has exactly the right surrealism-to-logic proportions to keep the book from spiraling out into whimsy—it's funny and dark, but never silly. It made for a great book club discussion, especially for all of us ladies of a certain age. Definitely recommended if you're one of those.

Beginning as a simple tale of some of the indignities of aging, this soon veered off into the surreal and magical, but in a way that I thoroughly enjoyed. 92 year old Marion lives with her son, her son's wife, and the wife's son. She is deaf and eccentric, and they barely tolerate her. Soon after the book opens, they place her in a home for elderly women where Marion becomes involved with assorted other eccentrics. Each lives in a separate building, one shaped like a birthday cake, one like a mushroom, and so on. Things become more and more bizarre.
The book was very funny. Carrington writes very well, and is a wonderful prose stylist. This is definitely a unique book, and one I will long remember.

Here are some snippets of "Marionisms" I show more enjoyed:

"Sleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be, I often mix them up."
"People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable, if they are not cats."
"I do not wish anyone to think my mind wanders far, it wanders, but never farther than I want."
"I am never lonely....Or rather I do not suffer from loneliness. I suffer much from the idea that my loneliness might be taken away from me by a lot of mercilessly well-meaning people."
and finally,
"At times I had thought of writing poetry myself, but getting words to rhyme with each other is difficult, like trying to drive a herd of turkeys and kangaroos down a crowded thoroughfare and keep them together without looking into shop windows. There are so many words and they all mean something."

4 stars show less

What a kooky, fun ride this book is! The plot falls further and further down the rabbit hole, which is fitting as this could exist alongside 'Alice in Wonderland'. I feel this reminds me of so many books, but so many of the weird books I have read have probably been inspired by Leonora's writing. The details are so funny and so charming. I really enjoyed it.

Another favorite book of mine is Heidi Sopinka's 'The Dictionary of Animal Languages' which is inspired by Leonora Carrington's life using another name for the main character (Ivory). Now that I have read this book, I can definitely see that Ivory of 'Dictionary of Animal Languages' is also inspired by Marian Leatherby of 'The Hearing Trumpet', both being older women over the age of show more ninety recounting their memories. Marian says "my memory is full of all sorts of stuff which is not, perhaps, in chronological order, but there is a lot of it" - which is basically the plot and purpose of 'The Dictionary of Animal Languages' and Ivory of 'Dictionary' says that she is in a "protest against forgetting".

"Although freedom has come to us somewhat late in life, we have no intention of throwing it away again. Many of us have passed our lives with domineering and peevish husbands. When we were finally delivered of these we were chivvied around by our sons and daughters who not only no longer loved us, but considered us a burden and objects of ridicule and shame. Do you imagine in your wildest dreams that now we have tasted freedom we are going to let ourselves be pushed around once more by you and your leering mate?" (pg 154)

The book is definitely not only kooky. There is some real deep meaning and messages there.All three of these women - Leonora, Marian, and Ivory did not need to reach old age to be marginalized. In my mind, they exist in conversation with each other. I am very appreciative to 'The Hearing Trumpet' for at least opening my eyes to a new facet of 'The Dictionary of Animal Languages' and of course, Leonora herself. show less

Born in 1917, Leonora Carrington was the archetypal Surrealist wild child and muse, and a painter and writer in her own right, who ran away from London to Paris age 19 to continue her love affair with the painter Max Ernst. Post war, and after incarceration in a Spanish mental institution, she settled in Mexico. The Hearing Trumpet is just as surprising and anarchic as you might expect from someone with Leonora Carrington’s history.

Marian Letherby, age 92, is an Englishwoman living in an unnamed Spanish-speaking American country with her son and his family. Given a hearing trumpet by her friend Carmella she discovers that her family is planning to send her to a home run by the ‘Well of Light Brotherhood:

‘The Well of Light show more Brotherhood’ said Carmella, ‘ is obviously something extremely sinister. Not I suppose a company for grinding old ladies into breakfast cereal, but something morally sinister. It all sounds terrible. I must think of something to rescue you from the jaws of the Well of Light’.’

On arrival at the home, Marion discovers that the ‘Well of Light’ is strange indeed:

‘The main building was in fact a castle, surrounded by various pavilions with incongruous shapes. Pixielike dwellings shaped like toadstools, Swiss chalets, railway carriages, one or two ordinary bungalows, something shaped like a boot, another like what I took to be an outsize Egyptian mummy.’

And why is there a very strange portrait of a winking nun in the dining hall?

The first half of The Hearing Trumpet is merely a little idiosyncratic, but halfway through Marion is given a manuscript to read: ‘A True and Faithful rendering of the Life of Rosalinda Alvarez Della Cueva, abbess of the Convent of Saint Barbara of Tartarus’ and after this things get very weird indeed.

I struggled with this half-way through, but the ending was so utterly unexpected and so very, very mad that it completely redeemed itself. Imagine a surrealist painting written down and you won’t go far wrong! show less