The Hearing Trumpet

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.

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 original Latin root for 'obedience' is obaudire. It can be translated as ‘standing by, ready to listen’. Don’t let it fool you, The Hearing Trumpet is drenched in anarchism.

Its timeless rebelliousness appears as matter of fact and is of the healthiest kind: the stabbing social commentary sustains a very low level of venom and the narrator’s tone remains stately even when things get violent (it’s Mrs Carrington's signature trait, I am told). The novel follows the surrealist tradition with grace and without the usual self-indulgence that plagues the art of this variety. It’s all genuine, free-spirited and plain awesome sabbath of the weird; the bizarre imagery bleeds into the book’s reality gradually, in increasingly show more incisive bursts, but never diminishes the idea behind it. Even the now-familiar White Goddess tropes are delivered with flair and same thing can be said about the amazing finale in which, not to reveal too much, the order of things becomes somewhat re-oriented.

The book is full of brilliantly subtle comic characterizations but one truly unforgettable character is Remedios Varo-inspired Carmella: an avid loud-thinker and a red-wig wearing proto-riot girl in her 80’s. She steals the show every single time she appears.

Wild at heart and weird on top, this endlessly inventive book about elderly ladies has aged much better (if at all) than you’d think surrealist writing could. It may be not exactly my cup of tea but I can recognize a genius when I see one.

Read it and live free or die hard. show less

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.

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

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

I would like for my review of this book to consist of a series of funny quotes from its pages, because there are quite a few and they were, to me, very exceptionally funny. But then that would ruin the joy of reading such wittiness for the first time, should anyone a) read my review and then b) decide to read The Hearing Trumpet, either because of my review or in spite of it.

This was a joy to read. A joy that got outlandishly weird at times, at other times a little dull (and even sometimes both), but a joy all the same.