So much fun. Reminds me of Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Warner, except significantly more wild. It's a novel that constantly is upending its own narrative expectations--it's a humorous meditation on aging and ageism that becomes a gothic romance which becomes a magical realist murder mystery which becomes an apocalypse which becomes a founding of a new kind of world and a restoration of a different kind of religion. Does that mean that there's bunch of narrative threads which don't end up going anywhere? Yeah. But it also is an enormous rollicking adventure of a book that's often delightful.
I do wish it were less essentialist in its understandings of gender, and there's some racist depictions of characters of color that are uncomfortable at best. Like a lot of work by white cis women at this time, it comes very close to some really big ideas, but is hampered in its execution by the author's own paradigms. ( )

For some reason this one painting really speaks to me:
Leonora Carrington, The Temptation of St. Anthony (1945)

Carrington is a visual artist as well as an author. Like [a:Mervyn Peake|22018|Mervyn Peake|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1341040504p2/22018.jpg], her artistic sensibilities are evident through her writing; essentially The Hearing Trumpet is as much a dadaist painting as it is a novel. It can be effectively divided into three parts each getting progressively more bizarre. The first is when the old woman is consigned to a nursing home, the second is the strange plot around the two psychic murderesses and the mystery of the winking Abbess, and the third is the supernatural cosmic winter the world is plunged into after the apparent triumph of the Venus cult. Throughout it the lead character and her compatriots, all elderly women, gain more and more freedom and vitality. They start the book as not just prisoners of their husbands and sons who shunt them aside but also of their own frail bodies. They end the book as masters of a surreal new realm. Carrington suggests that the patriarchy (never directly identified as such) is a cosmic mistake, the result of the sons of Adam stealing a chalice from the goddess Venus. Neglected old women in a remote nursing home unleash a winged beast to right this historical wrong and "sow panic among the nations." In the process the world tilts, the poles shift places, tropical birds languish confused on a snowy landscape, and whimsy reigns supreme.

Edit: My only real frustration in this book is the presence of a character that can only be described uncharitably as a Magical Negress. It would fit the genre and be less demeaning if that character were a figure in a dream, or a gust of wind, or a talking swan. Oh well, it's just one sour note at the symphony. ( )

I find it difficult to express how much I enjoyed this book. It has ignited a passion and hyperfixation for surrealism and surrealist and absurdist literature I am about to absolutely dive headfirst into. I devoured the audiobook in two sittings, staying up until gone 0400 and putting it on being the first thing I did this morning because this books is mesmerising!

Giving the overview of a surrealist story is always incredibly lacklustre, but here goes: An old lady with diminished hearing is gifted an ear trumpet with which she hears her family planning to ship her off to a facility for senile old women. She travels to the facility and is forced to join in the bizarre activities and strict esoteric form of Christianity. Friends and enemies are made. A history of an abess who quested for Holy Grail is recounted. Someone dies in suspicious circumstances and many of the ladies band together in protest. Things get very strange with a tower, riddles, a new age, geography and werewolves.

The above doesn't really spoil anything and absolutely doesn't do the book justice. I am a not even a novice when it comes to the surreal, though I have admired it and the Dada movement from afar for many years and only now really venturing into the literature, so I have no idea what to say. I just know that it was weird and wonderful. It is so rare to see old ladies presented with such character and agency, and I look forward to exploring what much more learned people have to say about it.

There are a few phrases regarding race that have not aged well. They do not seem to contain malice, though this absolutely not my place to say, and appear to be a vernacular of the time. However, this doesn't make them right to be used and shouldn't be ignored in a contemporary reading.

I listened to the great amateur recording of the book narrated by D J Elliott: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmZPvb_2WrJ6oT1CK0QpMcYVriJQSH4TT&si=mcod...

***Minor Spoiler***

As a transfemme, I'm particularly interested in the character of Maud/ Arthur. While assumptions are given by one character as to why she came to be at the facility, I believe Maud can be read as a trans character, especially with her only being presented and discussed as a woman by herself and others until the end. I don't really know what to say about it, beyond that I like this as a headcanon and hope the discussion in the book isn't triggering for any trans folx who also read Maud this way. ( )

I appreciated what the book was doing but also it never really connected with me fully. I'm going to blame some of this on being autistic. The book needs you to appreciate a lot of different surrealistic and dream like connections and I mostly just... Didn't feel it.

Stuff that I enjoyed: the few illustrations are all absolutely amazing. Although the book didn't have a normal plot structure the very last line was kind of a beautiful shaggy dog like resolution and I always appreciate those. And the general concept of writing from the perspective of an elderly lady who may well be senile but still is her own strong character and deserves better than where society wants to place her is great - I did pretty consistently enjoy having her as the narrator.

I think the big thing is that part way through the book shifts to a pretty surreal mode. Which is understandable given the author was a member of the Surrealist International. It's not out of left field - there's enough stuff from early on that hints at it - but it does sort of end the development of all the characters introduced and completely departs from even a hint at the real life issues of age and womanhood and institutionalisation that the first part seemed very concerned with. It also starts by sort of appearing to be more of a mystery where thing will be explained to some extent - they're not but that's fine.

It's just for me personally none of the more symbolic and more magic stuff landed at all. One of the bits is personal around trans stuff - it wasn't offensive exactly just when the book is playing with symbols and womanhood it felt... You know one of the characters in the all woman old people home is revealed to have a penis after she dies. It's not handled sensitively but it's not offensive, more a curiosity that she decided to live her senior years as a woman in a care home. But given that this event seems to kickstart the womanly renewal of the rest of the inhabitants it feels like... Hmm. I see.

There's some strange race issues - the setting is somewhere in Spanish speaking Americas but most of the inhabitants of the care home including the narrator appear to be Europeans. Except for one slightly more mysterious and mystical character who is referred to as... "A Negress". I can assume that was a translation issue, I guess. It feels strange symbolically that a book that focuses on a sort of mystical liberation for old women in the Americas is so tied to Europe, including mythologically.

After I wrote this i realised that the ending surreal section is clearly a strangely optimistic reading of nuclear winter which I'm not sure makes me like it more - I just felt I recognised the symbolism and it was bad - but definitely makes it more interesting than I originally thought ( )

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. ( )