Leonora Carrington

92-year-old Marian Leatherby is given a hearing trumpet, then discovers that what her family is saying is that she is to be committed to an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos and the gateway to the underworld is open.

The Hearing Trumpet

Ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that family is saying that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is open..

Prashant Prasad

A classic of fantastic literature, Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet is the occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, published with an introduction by Ali Smith in Penguin Modern Classics.One of the first things ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby overhears when she is given an ornate hearing trumpet is her family plotting to commit her to an institution. Soon, she finds herself trapped in a sinister retirement home, where the elderly must inhabit buildings shaped like igloos and birthday cakes, endure twisted religious preaching and eat in a canteen overlooked by the mysterious portrait of a leering Abbess. But when another resident secretly hands Marian a book recounding the life of the Abbess, a joyous and brilliantly surreal adventure begins to unfold. Written in the early 1960s, The Hearing Trumpet remains one of the most original and inspirational of all fantastic novels.Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a British born Surrealist painter and writer described, alongside people such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro, as one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement. Born in Lancashire to a strict Catholic family, she first came into contact with surrealism through her lover, Surrealist painter Max Ernst, before moving to Mexico in 1942. The Hearing Trumpet, her most famous piece of writing, was first published in France in 1974.If you enjoyed The Hearing Trumpet, you might like Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days' Luis Buñuel'One of the most original, joyful, satisfying and quietly visionary novels of the twentieth century'Ali Smith'This book is so inspiring...I love its freedom, its humour and how it invents its own laws. What specifically do I take from her? Her wig'Björk

Léa Beauchemin-Laporte

Jessica Smith

I don't want you to think this is a begrudging three stars; I really did like it. The book is very strange and weird, and I feel like a LOT of it went over my head, but... it was short (as I must have mentioned, this quality in a book will make me forgive a lot of sins), and it is highly quotable.

For instance, some quotes I got out of it - "Policemen are not human beings so how can police dogs be animals?" and "the notoriously pig-headed race of Britain…" (as an Anglo, this one cracked me up quite a lot.)

I also like the idea of writing about old women who've been basically cast out by their families, because they're too old to be considered properly "human" any more. And that's such a depressing idea, so I like that this book was quite light-hearted and good-humoured about it, without shying away from it at all.

It's just, like I said, I felt like a lot went over my head... and at one point there was a 27-page diversion to describe the history of some people and I tend to dislike it when books do that. But yeah. Overall, I liked it, and that's what three stars is meant to suggest so there!