{"id":10576,"date":"2024-11-25T17:07:37","date_gmt":"2024-11-25T17:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=10576"},"modified":"2024-11-25T17:07:37","modified_gmt":"2024-11-25T17:07:37","slug":"the-hearing-trumpet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=10576","title":{"rendered":"The Hearing Trumpet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Leonora Carrington, Penguin Modern Classics 2005<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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After reading Dame B\u2019s review of the Leonora Carrington exhibition a few weeks ago, I was determined to see it, and the only disappointment was that there were no fridge magnets of her bizarre and haunting works in the shop. I bought her book instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who could resist a slim novel in the distinguished livery of a Penguin Modern Classic, with the imprimatur of world-class Surrealist Luis Bu\u00f1uel, \u2018Reading this liberates us from the miserable reality of our days.\u2019? With winter coming on, this sounded like just what I needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not going to attempt a summary of the plot, which ranges wildly through time, across continents and onto the astral plane.  The basic premise is that our heroine Marian Leatherby is a ninety-two-year-old woman living with her boorish grandson and his wife. When her best friend Carmella gives her a hearing trumpet, she finds out what her ghastly grandson really thinks of her (\u2018She\u2019s a drooling sack of decomposing flesh\u2019) and his plans for her: incarceration in a \u2018reasonably inexpensive institution run by an American cereal company’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately for Marian, she has an unassailably positive image of herself, despite what others think: \u2018Indeed I do have a short grey beard which conventional people would find repulsive. Personally I find it rather gallant.\u2019 She also takes herself seriously as a raconteur, and has a fund of anecdotes she is keen to relay to others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her move to the institution is far from happy. She is obliged to leave her beloved cats with Carmella, and the regime at her new establishment involves endless self-scrutiny and self-discipline with a view to improving one\u2019s Inner Christianity, overseen by the oppressive Dr and Mrs Gambit. Some of Marian\u2019s fellow \u2018detainees\u2019 also give cause for concern, and it\u2019s when she detects a case of poisoning that all hell breaks loose, and that\u2019s perhaps not a metaphor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As ancient documents and strange riddles come to light, we are sucked into a vortex of mysticism involving the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, alchemy, Egyptian mythology, climate change, werewolves \u2013 you name it. The Welsh bard Taliessin appears as a kind of time-travelling Postman Pat, crossing centuries and oceans with his songs and his sack of letters. It doesn\u2019t really matter if you can\u2019t make head or tail of this , as the wild ride itself is enjoyable, narrated in Marian\u2019s dry and level-headed voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her friend Carmella is a wonderful character, Full of fantastical schemes, she is also practical and loyal, providing a lifeline to Marian and the other sufferers in their austere prison: they are saved from starvation by her emergency delivery of tins of sardines, washed down with port smuggled in in hot water bottles. Both her optimism and her catastrophising take extreme forms: with any luck she could win a helicopter in a crossword competition, but any misstep in Marian\u2019s escape plans might see the pair of them chastised by Nubians in scarlet loincloths\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her appearance towards the end of the book (rest assured, this is not the sort of book in which the concept of \u2018spoiler\u2019 applies) as a dea ex machina with a violet limousine and a Chinese manservant is nothing short of uplifting. (She has become a squillionairess by digging under the servants\u2019 lavatory and inadvertently exposing a seam of uranium.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I have one criticism of the book, it\u2019s that there is a large chunk of wholly realistic autobiography right in the middle of it \u2013 but hey, what could be more surreal than that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mind-bending, funny, and with a strong streak of feminism running through it, The Hearing Trumpet<\/em> is indeed escapism extraordinaire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… with any luck she’ll win a helicopter in a crossword competition…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":10578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,68,217,70,309,126],"tags":[575],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10576"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10576"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10583,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10576\/revisions\/10583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}