The Hearing Trumpet

By: Leonora Carrington

Narrated by: Siân Phillips

Surreal and splendidly unconventional, The Hearing Trumpet is an apocalyptic fairy-tale quest about an occult old ladies' home and the spry nonagenarian who ends up there. After coming into possession of a hearing trumpet, 92-year-old Marian Leatherby discovers her son's plans to send her to a nursing home. But this is no ordinary place.... Here there are strange rituals, orgiastic nuns, levitating abbesses, animalistic humans, humanistic animals, a search for the Holy Grail, and a plan to escape to Lapland and knit a tent....

Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington's novel is an exhilarating journey brimming with laugh-out-loud humor and absurd lunacy.

©1976 Leonora Carrington (P)2017 Naxos AudioBooks

The character and the writing.

It was well written. The characters were well developed, and this is a topic relatable .

I want to see this as a movie

What a discovery! This is the book I would’ve liked to write, full of magical realism, and a vision that keeps bending, bending bending our notion of what should happen. All the while, keeping wonderful solid characters.

Mixed review

For me this novel was interesting at the outset, but somewhere shortly after the middle it became weird and boring. My experience of this work by Carrington was very different from the impact that her stunning sculptures had on me when I experienced them in the Museum Leonora Carrington in Xilitla, Mexico. Those sculptures were so powerful they literally brought me to tears.

Absurdism invades the Old Folks Home

Loved this surrelast gypsy dream of a novel flirting with loneliness, isolation, old age, and archaic phantasms.

Old woman's daydream?

Brilliantly performed. The voice actress kept me engaged. The story itself started very much normal than took a drastic dip into fantasy out of nowhere. Interesting to say the least.