La debuttante

by Leonora Carrington, Nancy Marotta (Translator), Mariagrazia Gini (Translator)

Donna dall'eccentricità indomabile, Leonora Carrington fu una delle «muse inquietanti» del surrealismo, dal quale però non smise mai di tenersi a debita distanza, anche negli anni in cui viveva con Max Ernst. I suoi quadri, enigmatici e beffardi, sono oggi celebrati e ricercati, ma non meno rivelatrice è la sua opera in prosa – e in particolare questi racconti, nei quali già Breton riconosceva un vertice dello «humour nero» (definizione che a lui risale). Qui il lettore potrà incontrare per la prima volta le sue creature predilette, esseri dalla natura sempre mutevole e indecifrabile, oscillanti tra l'aria ingannevole della nursery – deposito di sogni e relitti infantili – e l'orrore puro. Come nel racconto da cui prende il titolo la raccolta, dove una giovane debuttante, per evitare di partecipare al ballo organizzato dalla madre in suo onore, chiede a una iena il favore di sostituirla: con conseguenze feroci e esilaranti. Tutti «fantasmi di famiglia», su cui sentiamo aleggiare la risata rauca e affettuosamente crudele della Carrington. Per lei, ciò che per altri fu la scoperta della surrealtà, era la normalità stessa – come constatò sin dall'infanzia passata in una magione goticheggiante, che si poteva trasformare facilmente in un'allucinazione.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Art, Surreal, Magical Realism

179 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 2017

About the author

Leonora Carrington was an English-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

my becoming-a-genius project, part 28!

the background:
i have decided to become a genius.

to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the collected stories of various authors, reading + reviewing 1 story every day until i get bored / lose every single follower / am struck down by a vengeful deity.

terrible vibes from this cover, i can't wait to read it.


DAY 1: THE DEBUTANTE
a rich girl whose only friends are animals at the zoo so she has a hyena attend a party as her while wearing another person's face...this is off to an incredible start.
rating: 4


DAY 2: THE OVAL LADY
if all of these stories are about beautiful rich girls being weird and ugly and violent, we are in for a damn good time.
rating: 3.5


DAY 3: THE ROYAL SUMMONS
this level of madness is giving alice's adventures in wonderland, and that is the highest compliment i can give anything.
rating: 4


DAY 4: A MAN IN LOVE
we should all dream that one day we'll die but we'll be warm forever and we can be the site of chickens laying their eggs and fruit farms.
rating: 3.5


DAY 5: UNCLE SAM CARRINGTON
kind of a bummer to be corrected on etiquette by a talking horse who kicks you a lot.
rating: 3


DAY 6: THE HOUSE OF FEAR
back to back talking horse ones. another friendless girl becomes very close with a talking animal one. i'm loving the running themes here.
rating: 3


DAY 7: AS THEY RODE ALONG THE EDGE
in hindsight i should have realized surrealism would scratch the alice's adventures in wonderland itch for me much sooner.
rating: 3


DAY 8: PIGEON, FLY
talking sheep and mirror horror and more horses. but in a fun way.
rating: 3.5


DAY 9: THE THREE HUNTERS
i know i can't shut up about this but this is sooo giving a mad tea party...if the mad hatter, dormouse, and march hare were irishmen and the tea was replaced with sausages.
rating: 3.5


DAY 10: MONSIEUR CYRIL DE GUINDRE
well, i mean. this one, about vanity and beauty and attempted acts of potential incest, was a bit much.
rating: 3


DAY 11: THE SISTERS
leonora carrington has a uniquely evil mind when it comes to picking names. like what is "drusille."
rating: 3.5


DAY 12: CAST DOWN BY SADNESS
relatable.

this story is about a girl showing feet and our protagonist thanking her so profusely that the girl kisses her profusely and is like "you're a genius. please live with me." if you can believe that we're just supposed to move past that and read about death.
rating: 4


DAY 13: WHITE RABBITS
i expected an alice heavy one from that title, and like all of them this was definitely alice esque. a lot stinkier, though. and more carnivorous.
rating: 4


DAY 14: WAITING
this story starts out with two old ladies physically fighting each other in the street at night and never gets less normal. awesome.
rating: 4


DAY 15: THE SEVENTH HORSE
new life goals is to have a garden that's so big that some weird feral girl-creature and her six horse best friends can live in there eating grass and watching birds without me even noticing.

either that or to be the aforementioned girl-creature.
rating: 3.5


DAY 16: THE NEUTRAL MAN
this one is both more surreal and less surreal than the others. and also more british.
rating: 3


DAY 17: A MEXICAN FAIRYTALE
oh that's not —
rating: 2


DAY 18: ET IN BELLICUS LUNARUM MEDICALIS
this is a story about rats who can do surgery but it's no ratatouille.
rating: 2.5


DAY 19: MY FLANNEL KNICKERS
this is about how to avoid accidentally becoming a saint by being too hot. in other words, a very useful guide for me.
rating: 3.5


DAY 20: THE HAPPY CORPSE STORY
this is just such a great title. too great, even.
rating: 3


DAY 21: HOW TO START A PHARMACEUTICALS BUSINESS
this is about if you win the lottery in the future and win the toothbrush-sized corpse of stalin and eat one of his mustache hairs, thus discovering its medicinal practices. so fairly useful.

leonora was pretty preoccupied by the soviet union.
rating: 3.5


DAY 22: MY MOTHER IS A COW
evocative.

i don't know if these have gotten worse over time, or just pack less of a punch coming one after the other, but...it's a bummer.
rating: 3


DAY 23: THE SAND CAMEL
everyone knows that if you make a camel out of sand it's fine unless you mix butter in. then it's bound to decapitate a grandma.
rating: 3


DAY 24: MR GREGORY'S FLY
this one read like a picture book. hold the pictures.
rating: 3


DAY 25: JEMIMA AND THE WOLF
oh thank god. we're back to our weird rich girl x animals x violence roots to finish this out.
rating: 4


OVERALL
i enjoyed this so, so much at the beginning of the month, but the surreal power of these was dulled by me reading them one after the other. it doesn't help that the nature of "complete" stories means taking the good with the bad.

i will certainly be revisiting this in the future, and think my feelings will only benefit from that.
rating: 3.5

[Glenn Russell]

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) - artist and writer with a distinctive vision within the world of Surrealism. Her paintings, sculptures and stories are filled with eccentric beings that shapeshift between plant, animal, human and object, between this world and other worlds.

Leonora despised regimentation and conformity from an early age. Her radical, rebellious behavior led to her being expelled from more than one school. Then, at the age of ten, she beheld her first Surrealist painting in a Left Bank gallery in Paris. We can imagine the psychic explosion - as if Leonora could see for the first time she was not alone, she did have kindred spirits who could express themselves by their art.

At age nineteen Leonora met the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, age forty-six and married, but Leonora's Surrealist mind was simply too powerful to prevent the two artists from running off together and eventually marrying. But then history intervenes and....you can read all about it in Kathryn Davis' fine introduction to this collection of stories published by Dorothy Project.

Since my prime interest is literature rather than history or biography, I'll focus on a batch of Leonora stories themselves that scream out from her literary uniqueness and, as Kathryn Davis puts it, "Her habit of refusal of the world she was born into."

All of the below stories are written in the first person by an unnamed narrator I'll take the liberty of calling Leonora, since, after all, the author told her biographer Joanna Moorhead that "every piece of writing she ever did was autobiographical."

THE DEBUTANTE
"When I was a debutante, I often went to the zoo. I went so often that I knew the animals better than I knew the girls of my own age."

So begins this tale where the narrator (a good bit of autobiography here) relates her mother was arranging a ball in her honor causing poor Leonora great distress since she always detested balls, especially when given in her honor.

But then Leonora comes up with a plan while speaking with a hyena, one of the zoo animals she's particularly fond of - the hyena can go to the ball this evening in her place.

Events move apace and the hyena, now in Leonora's bedroom, proposes a way to go to the ball as human rather than hyena: "Ring for the maid, and when she comes in we'll pounce upon her and tear off her face. I'll wear her face tonight instead of mine."

Surrealism, anyone? In her New York Times review, here's what Parul Sehgal had to say about what it's like to read a Leonora Carrington story: "In the middle of the fluffy fairy tale, something bristles, something unpleasantly familiar, something human and frightening."

THE OVAL LADY
"A very tall thin lady was standing at the window. The window was very high and very thin too."

Leonora Carrington had a lifelong obsession with levitation and people that can look down at the world from a great height. For example, the oval lady of the story is at least ten feet tall.

At one point, the oval lady, Lucretia by name, asks narrator Leonora, "Did you come to play with us? I'm glad, because I get very bored here. Let's make believe that we're all horses. I'll turn myself into a horse; with some snow, it'll be more convincing."

However, any rambunctiousness is quickly snuffed out by two bastions of decency and order: an old woman of the house who is probably Lucretia's nanny and Lucretia's loathsome father. Poor Lucretia! And to think, she looks to be no older than sixteen.

UNCLE SAM CARRINGTON
An odd tale where Leonora's friend, the horse, suggests they go watch ladies at work in their garden. And what a sight they see, as in -

"The ladies were in their kitchen garden. It was behind their house and was surrounded by a high brick wall. I climbed on the horse's back, and a pretty astonishing sight met my eyes: the Misses Cunningham-Jones, each armed with a huge whip, were whipping the vegetables on all sides, shouting, "One's got to suffer to go to Heaven. Those who do not wear corsets will never get there."
The vegetables, for their part, were fighting amongst themselves, and the larger ones threw the smaller ones at the ladies with cries of hate.
"It's always like this," said the horse in a low voice. "The vegetables have to suffer for the sake of society. You'll see that they'll soon catch one for you, and that it'll die for the cause."

Reading this Leonora yarn, I wondered how elements from her background, things like all those nuns and Catholic teachings, influenced the ladies' violence against the vegetables - and by extension, violence against nature itself.

WHITE RABBITS
For me, this was the most shocking and disturbing of the tales in this collection.

One afternoon, having washed her hair, Leonora sits out on the small stone balcony of her city apartment in New York City to let her hair dry. Suddenly, she sees a large raven alight on the balcony of the house opposite. The raven sits on the balustrade and seems to peer into the empty window. A few minutes later, a woman comes out on the balcony carrying a large dish full of bones, which she empties on the floor. With an appreciative squeak, the raven hops down and pokes around in the bones.

The woman looks straight at Leonora and smiles in a friendly fashion. Leonora smiles back and waves the towel in her hand. This neighborly gesture encourages the woman to toss her head coquettishly and give Leonora an elegant, royal salute and then ask, "Do you happen to have any bad meat over there that you don't need? "Not at the moment," replies Leonora. To which the woman says if she happens to have any stinking, decomposed meat toward the end of the week, she'd be grateful if Leonora brought it over.

Leonora takes steps to get hold of bad meat and does bring it to the lady. What happens when she enters the woman's house is the stuff of nightmares. That closing sentence counts as one of the most powerful, surreal endings I've ever encountered in all of literature. Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.

I'll conclude with a quote from the Kathryn Davis Introduction:

"Nothing is what it seems to be in these stories, a philosophy Leonora applied to her own kitchen, where she was always more alchemist than chef, mixing tapioca with squid ink and serving it as caviar, snipping hair from the head of a despised sleeping guest and cooking it into the next morning's omelet."


Surrealist author and artist Leonora Carrington, (1917-2011)

[Nate D · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't remember at this point how I determined that Surrealism was somehow essential to my artistic (sub)consciousness. It feels like it was always there. I do know that this had really nothing to do with the most iconic (stereotyped) gestures from Dali or Breton, who I somewhat instinctively steered around, and more to with haunting Ernst landscapes and peculiar furred tableware lurking in the collections of the Met and MoMA, as well as oneiric guideposts glowing within filmed and written works by technical non-surrealists who were nonetheless inspired fellow travelers. Despite the melting clocks at the forefront of the popular (boring) imagination, though, Surrealism itself began as a predominantly written phenomenon, and I've long been scouring the book shop shelves for any traces of it. What I found was always of interest, but amid various exercises in theorizing and automatic writing, no single writer's vision seemed able to fulfill what exactly I was looking for, what I understood to be the hidden perfect potential in all of this.

Until I came to Leonora Carrington.

Here, at last: effortless yet perfectly-formed fables displaying an uneasy alliance of fairy tale, horror, dream, moral ambivalence, and pure rebellion. Carrington, who eloped and launched herself, already full-formed, into her literary and artistic career at age 19, has an effortless narrative style matched only by her uncanny/familiar feel for occult details and a disregard for societal strictures somewhere poised between dada and punk, even in the 1930s. She's easily my favorite surrealist. She's one of my favorite writers anywhere.

Carrington's work has long been pretty difficult to find, and seekers of her shorter works have mostly had to rely on two collections from the 1988, House of Fear and The Seventh Horse And Other Tales. Though leaving out a number of mid-length works from those two volumes (fortunately Down Below has just been reissued by the NYRB, but her wonderful surrealized recollection of time spent with Max Ernst in France, Little Francis, remains sadly buried) -- though leaving out the mid-length works, this collection brings together all of her stories for the first time, from her earliest (The Oval Lady and House of Fear) to anomalies written in Spanish in Mexico much later.

The collection also claims three previously unpublished stories. This overlooks The Sand Camel's appearance in the essential Surrealist Women anthology, but the final entry, "Jemima and the Wolf", makes up for this by being the longest of her stories, a 20-page myth of rejection of civilization that rivals "As We Rode along the Edge" and its protagonist Virginia Fur, even while moving past it into a spectral menace all its own. How did this stay out of print until now? It's clearly from her prime early period, and as good as any of the others. Are other gems like this still waiting buried in her manuscripts for such resurrection?

I'm also seizing this chance to revisit all of the classic, familiar Carrington stories as well, so perhaps I'll continue to add my notes here. Returning to "The Debutante" after probably five or six years, for instance, is such a joy. Everyone else is already quoting its most fantastic moment of elemental teen rebellion, but I will too:

My mother entered, pale with rage. “We were coming to seat ourselves at the table,” she said, “when the thing who was in your place rose and cried: ‘I smell a little strong, eh? Well, as for me, I do not eat cake.’ With these words she removed her face and ate it. A great leap and she disappeared out the window.”

[Coos Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leonora Carrington es fabulosa. Debo admitir que no conocía nada de su prosa, aunque sí la conocía como artista plástica. Me obsesioné con esta antología, toda surrealista y curiosa. Muy recomendable.

[Matteo Fumagalli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Videorecensione: https://youtu.be/lhlzd-5zD-Q

Frutti appesi agli alberi come piccoli cadaveri, iene che strappano la faccia a sventurate cameriere per il proprio nobile debutto in società, sorelle vampire affamate che volano verso la luna, sirene travestite da chierichetti che emergono da lussuose piscine...
addentrarsi tra i racconti di Leonora Carrington (musa del surrealismo, pittrice, autrice e compagna di Max Ernst) è straniente, macabro e divertentissimo.
Una lettura che, ovviamente, ho adorato.

[Annelies · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very peculiar tales. A lot of mad imagination, sometimes funny but often very usettling. Some tales did something to me that did frighten me. They feel full of subtle horror. It was like they were fairytales but a bit gruesome. Very surreal also. I am not sure what to think of them...

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This morning I pulled up my normal news feed and to my great pleasure, there was a link to an article at Literary Hub entitled "Your Surrealist Literature Starter Kit," where your eye first lands on Leonora Carrington's "Self-Portrait." As it happens, that particular painting serves as cover art for this book, which collects all of Carrington's short stories. In that post, Emily Temple says the following:

"These stories are weird and jagged and enchanting, fragmented and strikingly visual, barely stories at all sometimes, but oddly compulsive. How else to describe a collection that includes a woman winning the corpse of Joseph Stalin in the lottery and using it to cure whooping cough and syphillis?"

The bit about Joseph Stalin's corpse being used to treat diseases sounds off the wall and cryptic, but once you read the story ("How to Start a Pharmaceuticals Business"), it turns out to make a lot of sense. And this is just one part of the multi-faceted genius of Leonora Carrington's short stories -- they are put together with a logic that works in the worlds she creates, so much so that when a hostess of a party in "The House of Fear" wears a dress made of "live bats sewn together by their wings" and there is a group of horses playing a game where they

"simultaneously beat time to the tune of the 'Volga Boatmen' with your left foreleg, 'The Marseillaise' with your right foreleg, and 'Where have You Gone, My Last Rose of Summer' with your two back legs"

it doesn't seem weird at all. These stories are more than fable, more than just weird tales, and as Kathryn Davis says about them, "Nothing is what it seems to be." The collection is beyond outstanding; I will say that I spent a lot of time reading about Carrington's life before reading her fiction, and it definitely provided some measure of insight into her work. Her work is not only genius, it's gorgeous.

[Ipsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories read like the literary equivalent of a surrealist piece of art: elements haphazardly assembled together in an apparently nonsensical fashion and then...a ragged, shimmering explosion! Tiny little tableaus of mad schizophrenic worlds which, though not intellectually satisfying, sublimate some elemental desire for bacchanalian mayhem. Of course it makes sense that a hyena would skin a woman's face and wear it to a debutante ball.

A paint-splotched mind exploded into words, onto paper.

[Ana Peralta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leonora Carrington nos lleva con cada uno de sus relatos lejos de una realidad conocida y nos obliga a imaginar múltiples escenarios aceptado que todo puede ser posible dentro de la literatura y la pintura. ¡Magnífica recopilación!

[Carla Remy · Rating 4 out of 5]

01/2022

Talking horses, rabbits, cats, and strange half beast half human creatures. That look like her paintings. The first story , The Debutante, is one of the most outright horrific, with a hyena wearing a human face like Hannibal Lecter. The stories tend to end abruptly, which makes sense.
This is the first of Carrington's fiction I've read, but I've been familiar with her art for... thirty years.
I bought the book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement when I was 17 at the Met bookstore or maybe MOMA. I love the book. Five years ago, my friend gave me the book, Surreal Friends, about Carrington and Remedios Varo, also an exquisite book. I was obsessed with the Surrealist Movement as a teenager.
And look at the painting on the cover. It was considered pretty shocking for a woman to sit with her legs spread before, what, 1980? 90? Now still, but no one cares anymore.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite having previously read all but the last three of these stories (reviewed in more depth here and here), I still enjoyed them just as much during this second read. And because they are so brilliantly original and off-the-wall absurd, I had forgotten many of them, so it sometimes felt like I was reading them for the first time. What sets these stories apart from other surrealist/absurdist tales for me is the strength of Carrington's first-person narrators, who navigate through sometimes frightening and often hallucinatory landscapes with offhanded aplomb. Consequently, I find her third-person POV stories to be slightly less endearing, though still reflective of a singular imagination of epic proportions. If you have never dipped into Carrington's short fiction, there is no longer any excuse, for newly published collections have recently appeared in U.S. and U.K. editions. Prepare yourself for a panoply of talking animals, walking trees, violent vegetables, impossible to predict plot twists, and generous amounts of twisted humor.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Friend Jonathan brought this Forthcoming to my attention. Forthcoming (April '17) from Dorothy, A Publishing Project::
http://dorothyproject.com/?book=the-c...

“This definitive collection of Carrington’s short fiction is a treasure and a gift to the world. A stunning achievement.” --Jeff Vandermeer

As always in cases like these, do not miss Nate D's reviews of Carrington ::
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Cathérine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zet je hart en geest open en geniet van deze wonderlijke en uiterst originele verhalen. Een zeer levendige fantasie bezitten helpt om deze verhalen naar waarde te schatten.
Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was een beeldend kunstenaar, behorende tot de surrealistische stroming, die ook schreef. Dat ze dat surrealisme ook daar in doortrekt is een understatement.
Haar verhalen zijn bevolkt door nachtmerrieachtige personages in een magisch-realistische setting. Ze hebben geen echt begin of einde. Het lijken absurde, grappige, maar ook gruwelijke, uitgeschreven hallucinaties. Een fantasievolle wereld bedacht door een intens creatieve geest.

[Marko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leonora Carrington was an English-Mexican surrealist painter and a mighty talented one, if you ask me. During her life, she wrote a novel, a short memoir and many stories (in English, French and Spanish), all collected in a single book for the first time ever.

She writes as a painter; sentences are short and simple, but the choice of words is haunting, as are the stories/images, for her stories seem like sketches for surrealist paintings, filled with emotions, mythology, fantasy, carefully constructed with many symbols and original, idiosyncratic thoughts.

[Jana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was my first encounter with the literature of surrealism and, overall, it was a pleasant experience. Carrington clearly possessed a very special mind and an extraordinary imagination; her ability to create the most uncanny, bizarre worlds and exist at the intersection of fantasy and reality is mirrored both in her prose and her own life. The short stories in this book are equally whimsical and deeply unsettling, supplying the reader with constant doses of horror and confusion. While reading, I instantly felt caught up in a hazy, dream-like state of mind, where weird and inexplicable things happen but are somehow considered normal, where terrifying and unpredictable plot makes me both paralyzed and curious to see what happens next. When I lifted my eyes from the book, I suddenly saw my own reality through Carrington's surreal lens and rejoiced in the almost addictive feeling that nothing makes sense.

That being said, in my opinion Leonora Carrington was a better painter than she was a writer. I kept getting distracted by her simplistic literary style, which underpinned the plot in some passages but jeopardized the artistic effect in others. Also, I was initially enchanted with her choice of descriptive vocabulary and ability to create very vivid, juicy images, but her motives soon got compulsively repetitive: most of the stories featured similar patterns of horses, anthropomorphic animals and human-animal hybrid creatures, preoccupation with one's own beauty, perverse portrayals of decadent food combinations and dining rituals, or gothic horror houses. This made me think that, rather than some genius creativity, it may have been Carrington's own obsessions and insanity that motivated her art. I therefore suggest that the best way to read this book is to resist one's insatiable hunger for bewilderment and proceed in small portions, one short story at a time, so that the magic does not get lost in a surge of unvarying impressions.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary stories, stories where the human and animal overlap and a narrator's plaintive cry, "Why am I human?" can speak for many. But neither are the animals idealized; they are, well, very animal-like in their appetites, movements, and smells. Still their world is preferable to the cruelty and senselessness of humans. Full of humor, vitality, and odd juxtapositions, Carrington creates a world unlike any you'll inhabit--kin perhaps to dreams, but her vision is singular--one you'll be very glad to have been immersed in for a time.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leonora, una de mis artistas plásticas preferidas. Sus cuentos, además de leerse, se ven. Son lienzos formados de palabras. El surrealismo en estado puro. Genial artista. Muy buena escritora ❤️

[Iris L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Son los primeros cuentos de ficción que leo de Leonora y pienso que su escritura es el lado B de sus pinturas.
Siempre la he mirado como una artista multifacética, radical y con un estilo intenso y mientras leía sobre estos personajes mitad humanos mitad animal sentí como si estuviera observando una de sus pinturas.
Estas historias tienden a terminar abruptamente y ese es otro dato bizarro entre las ya varias curiosidades de que la narrativa es siempre en primera persona como algún secreto autobiográfico.
Abiertamente surrealista este oscuro y salvaje libro me ha fascinado, sin duda me quedo con ganas de leer más de Leonora.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly I'm too dumb to grasp the full meanings of most stories, but I think she really liked horses.

Also watched a documentary on Leonora Carrington after reading this ( Leonora Carrington: The Lost Surrealist ), it helped, she's my new idol now.

[Quiver · Rating 4 out of 5]

How can anybody be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense?

Reading is an unnatural act. Unlike the appreciation of aural and visual arts, reading requires conscious effort even before deep interpretations are sought. Children see, smell, touch, hear, and learn to speak, before they master the written word. It’s the hardest form of basic communication. Harder still if it courts the edge of the expected by riding upside down on the underbelly of unnatural beings while holding onto its senses by the seams of its straightjacket. Hardest of all, possibly, if it’s …

… surrealism.

Dali flashes before the mind. But, that’s not what I mean: the visual mind sees, then interprets or doesn’t. Reading surrealist literature, however, is an act of spike-studded iron will (and no little amount of curiosity for the quaint that you hope no one else ever finds out about).

Forget drinking from a firehose—firehoses gush at you, and it’s just water. Think instead: a fountain spouting body parts, balloons, beetles, bronze tables and acid blue jackets floating between the blessings and the bronchitis, and you roll up your trousers, step over the rim into this bizarre potpourri, get dragged down by something slithering in the water, but continue sitting in there with water up to your chin, collecting random floating objects and putting them together like legos—creating your very own Frankenstein. Occasionally you pluck up a memory or a scar. Occasionally you cut yourself.

Who said that exploring the unexplored within the safety of a book was good practice?

I’m not trying to be off-putting.

Actually, I am: if you’re not the kind to throw yourself into the aforementioned fountain out of curiosity (or spite, or kink, or whichever particular personal quirk), I would recommend fishing out only choice morsels and grappling with them on dry land.

You might discover you’re developing some odd tastes.

(This is the first part of a longer post on Carrington's book that you may find on my blog here.)

[Dona's Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hey there all my fellow readers and creatives. This is one of my Halloween Season reviews. Though these are not horror stories, it's perfectly fitting for this season, given that Leonora Carrington wrote some wonderfully weird, bizarre, sometimes downright eerie surrealism in which things eat each other and get eaten, and creatures act more human than the people do. She wrote at the turn of the twentieth century, while traveling the world and dodging or trying to escape the then-oppressive mental health system. This book represents her collected short works; if you're a surrealism or Grimm Brothers style fairy tale fan, you might consider grabbing a copy of this book.

Introductions are by and large boring and good for little more than lighting the stove, but I recommend reading the introduction for this book. The short biography for Carrington is fascination, but it also lends insight into the stories themselves.

Here are my likes and dislikes for this book:

Likes:

1. Leonora Carrington is the Frida Kahlo of short stories. Everything in this book drips with femininity and conflict, and because of the unsettling nature of surrealism, the stories have a profound emotional impact.

2. I adore Carrington's style. She favors certain constructions, symbols, images, even plot devices in these stories, so her style is definitely signature. Noticeable, without a doubt. Some might consider her heavy-handed (such a style was more common among modern writers), but it lends well to her approach to surrealism.

Dislikes:

1. Because of some of the style habits I mentioned about, such as the repeating symbols and images, the collection gets repetitive. You might sometimes get a deja vu feeling, like you might have read this story before. It's not you, I promise; It's Carrington's style; It's a pitfall for her.

I hope you enjoyed this review! Everyone stay safe and happy reading!

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

This devious little book (put out by the perenially delightful Dorothy Publishing) collects all of surrealist writer/painter Carrington's short stories into one volume for the first time. These are quite short, quirky tales laced with the dream-logic of surrealism that often veers off wherever it wants, ripe with symbolism, irrationality, and tangent-hopping narrative. There's definitely a macabre thread that runs through these satirical tales, as well as a kind of fixation on the body, nature/animals, and dismemberment. It's hard to rate these as many left me scratching my head, but an equal number left me smiling or chuckling to myself. Imagine if comedy was a dog in heat masquerading as a fairy tale while trying to shake off an Xolotl curse---now you understand this book.

(Advice I picked up from reading this: Don't trust talking birds. Talking corpses? Also, rarely benign. And, I believe, this is specifically a book for anyone who wants to start their own pharmaceutical company.)
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OTHER THINGS I'M SHOVING INTO THIS REVIEW TO MAKE UP FOR THE INJUSTICE I HAVE COMMITTED ABOVE...
- How Leonora Carrington Feminized Surrealism
- Reality Has No Place Here: The Stories of Leonora Carrington
- An Interview w/ Leonora Carrington (video)
- Leonora Carrington's Paintings


The Ancestory (1968)
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BONUS REWARD FOR SCROLLING THIS FAR: A SURREALIST JOKE

How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A fish.

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WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE? GO MAKE LOVE, TALK TO A PIG, OR CAUSE DISRUPTION.

[Liliana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Me costó mucho trabajo terminar el libro. Para mí fue un absoluto WTF.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot packed into these overtly surreal, dreamlike stories, and in most cases they're quite good. They usually deliver a vague whiff of their meaning, but when they're over I was never entirely sure what it was.

The better stories are the longer ones in almost all cases. The stories that attempt the horrific are also among the best, such as "White Rabbits," "Waiting," and "The Seventh Horse." "As They Rode Along the Edge," "Pigeon, Fly!" and "Jemima and the Wolf" are also great and although they're not overtly horrific, they do have an unsettling mood. On occasion these stories can be pretty funny as well.

The shorter stories too often left me wanting more development because they display great imagination, and the longer tales prove Carrington can write a wonderful story, but they need more room to breathe. Thus, I don't usually have a lot to say about these. This isn't a collection I would recommend reading straight through.


The Debutante - This story was a real surprise, it's very surreal and strange, macabre and humorous. It's quite funny, but shocking too. A girl who doesn't want to go to a ball asks a hyena to take her place.

The Oval Lady - This is a wild, and sad fantasy story. Again I am impressed by Carrington's imaginative power in these stories, never knowing what to expect. A man enters a young woman's house and is swept up into a world of fantasy.

The Royal Summons - A very short, fairly minor story I'd say. A visitor to the queen attends a meeting in her place for her, where she is elected to assassinate the queen by pushing her into a lion's cage in the menagerie.

A Man in Love - A delightful little dark fantasy, very weird and unpredictable, one of the best of the very short stories. A petty thief is forced to listen to a strange tale of woe by a fruit seller.

Uncle Sam Carrington - This is another very short story full of imaginative ideas, but I have no idea what the point was here. A girl who feels her mother's honor is hurt by her uncle, who laughs at the full moon, travels to see two aristocratic ladies who might offer a solution.

The House of Fear - This was another really strange story by Carrington, entirely unpredictable. I really liked where it was going, it's full of weird touches, but the ending didn't deliver, it's like she just gave up on it -- still, not bad. A man meets a horse who takes him to a house full of wonders.

As They Rode Along the Edge - This has to be my favorite of Carrington's tales. This one is one of the wildest, and the main theme seems to be one of religion versus nature. I am very impressed with Carrington's endless ability to surprise. A female nature spirit of the forest contests with a saint.

Pigeon, Fly! - This is another great story, although this one has even more twists and turns, over and through itself that leave one quite confused. Still, I liked it. A painter is asked to paint the portrait of a dead woman by her very odd grieving husband.

The Three Hunters - Another very short story, this one a little better than some of the other shorties here. It's quite funny and it would have been interesting if this one had been developed a bit more. A traveler in the woods happens upon a very strange family.

Monsieur Cyril de Guindre - This is one of the most decadent stories here, which definitely calls to mind The Picture of Dorian Gray -- the descriptions of flowers, food, clothing and sex are over the top, and the story more than hints at a homosexual relationship. This one feels more substantial than the average story here, although I'm unable to untangle all the sexual and cultural themes. A man who lives in decadent luxury and has abandoned his wife is visited by the daughter he thought he would never have to face again.

The Sisters - This is another favorite of mine, as near as Carrington comes to outright horror, this is a sort of vampire tale, although far from traditional. A woman waits for a visit from her lover, while hiding a very strange secret in the attic.

Cast Down by Sadness - This story is somewhat horrific like "White Rabbits" and "Waiting," but I liked those stories better. This one has a similar atmosphere but was less interesting. A traveler meets a very strange old woman and her family.

White Rabbits - I read this one in the anthology "The Weird" a few years ago. Re-reading this short story is a joy -- it's very well-told and unsettling, yet more conventional than the other stories here. A woman becomes fascinated by the house opposite, which is occupied by a very weird couple.

Waiting - I liked this one a lot, it's less dream-like and more of an eerie, nocturnal prose poem, very short at around 1,000 words, but with a lot packed into it. A mysterious young woman waiting for her lover discovers a grim secret.

The Seventh Horse - This is a great story, very weird and I do not entirely understand the ending of it, but it's full of wonderful dark imagery and imagination, and a subtly uneasy ending that makes you wonder. This almost reminds me of Bruno Schulz at times. After a woman finds a strange creature in her garden it sets off a terrible series of events.

The Neutral Man - This story feels like a dream, several jumbled up events that make absolutely no sense, with a vague sense of persecution. A woman is invited to a masked ball full of strange characters.

A Mexican Fairy Tale - I found this story quite funny, it's really weird and seems entirely nonsensical until the end which seems to have a philosophical point.

Maria - This is the second part of "A Mexican Fairy Tale," just as strange and unpredictable. Neither of these made a big impression on me, although they're full of interesting imagery.

Et in bellicus lunarum medicalis - This is a surreal and humorous tale, full of good humored chaos. A society of doctors tries to get rid of a load of rats, who are trained for surgery.

My Flannel Knickers - A brief episode, seemingly about a dead man who tells us his tale. All I can make of the story is the teller feels that other's are trying to steal his "cosmic wool" to build new bodies.

The Happy Corpse Story - I liked this story, although it's as nonsensical as many others it has an interesting plot and some great humor. A lovesick young man is given a ride on the back of a corpse he will never forget.

How to Start a Pharmaceuticals Business - A funny and absurdist story. This story gives us a look at an absurd future where the past is forgotten and misinterpreted.

My Mother Is a Cow - No idea what this story is about, but I liked this: "To be one human creature is to be a legion of mannequins. These mannequins can become animated according to the choice of the individual creature. He or she may have as many mannequins as they please. When the creature steps into the mannequin he immediately believes it to be real and alive and as long as he believes this he is trapped inside the dead image, which moves in ever-increasing circles away from Great Nature. Every individual gives names to his mannequins and nearly all these names begin with “I am” and are followed by a long stream of lies."

The Sand Camel - The shortest story in the book by far, about two boys who create a camel out of sand, which comes to life.

Mr. Gregory’s Fly - Another very short story, this one quite funny. A man has a strange affliction, which no doctor is able to cure.

Jemima and the Wolf - This story is subtly unsettling, and fortunately a bit longer than many which have preceded it too, so it gets a bit more development. A rebellious girl becomes fascinated by the wolfish houseguest of her father.

[Yael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me gustó. Disfruté los cuentos dejándome llevar muy lejos de la realidad y fue para mi mente algo que no esperaba, me hizo la lectura fluída y disfrutable simplemente dejarme llevar a estos mundos junto a estos personajes y esos castillos llenos de criaturas, fue una experiencia relajante dejar vagar la imaginación en cada relato. Pero lo que más me gustó fue que más que cuentos para mí fueron cuadros, con cada descripción y narrativa se iban pintando en mi cabeza estos mundos y personajes ideados por Leonora y fue una experiencia de lo más satisfactoria poder imaginar todo lo que ella creó. Además de que en muchos de ellos se siente una fuerte crítica social a través de un humor exquisito.

"¿No es suficiente con que el mundo esté lleno de feos seres humanos? ¿Para qué, además, hacer copias suyas?"

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark, savage and impenitent prose. Yet penetrable as dreams, because they are, and dreams welcome us.

[Guttersnipe Das · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember reading the Mary Ann Caws anthology, Surrealist Painters and Poets, and loving the selection of Leonora Carrington’s stories more than anything else in that treasure-house of a book. The more I reread Carrington’s stories, the more ferocious they appeared. They seemed to be written as if the fast-forward button had been pushed at least 3 times, as if Kafka had teamed up with Jane Bowles in a manic, drunken, hilarious rage.

As best I could, I hunted more Carrington stories. I read them standing up in libraries. The volumes that contained them were out of print and costly. The Dorothy Project has already published a remarkable series of books, but this book is their most gorgeous contribution yet. These stories are indelible, unforgettable. They’re nasty in the very best way.

As an aspirant in the field of stories, I wanted to imitate these stories as soon as I read them, but I also felt discouraged -- because Leonora Carrington is one of those people -- like Jane Bowles, like Clarice Lispector -- who started right off as a genius. There is a unity between the stories written in the Thirties and those written in the Seventies. Although I love the latter ones, it seems the ones from the Thirties and Forties are the best.The later stories seem composed; you can pick out themes and metaphors. The early stories have a supranormal authority, bloody and beyond the human, like scripture.

My favorite story, “The Seventh Horse”, might also serve as commentary on Carrington’s career: 2 truly dreadful society ladies discover in the garden: “a strange-looking creature was hopping about in the midst of a bramble bush. She was caught by her long hair, which was so closely entwined in the brambles that she could move neither backwards nor forwards. She was cursing and hopping till the blood flowed down her body”. One rich lady says, “I do not like the look of it”; the other says “I strongly object to trespassers.”

To which the enraged and entangled creature shrieks, “I’ve been here for years! But you are too stupid to have seen me.”

[Gastón V. A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ya venía adelantando, en mis actualizaciones de lectura, lo nada que estaba disfrutando leer este libro. Hubo una excepción de un cuento: "Vuela, paloma", que me dio cierta esperanza de que, a partir de ahí, todo podía mejorar, pero no pasó. También algunos comienzos de cuentos, algunas frases aisladas, algún atisbo de humor (hay más humor que lo que resalto, pero me parece ingenuo, demasiado naif, demasiado parecido a una broma mal formulada desde el inicio y que no causa gracia), algunas temáticas profundas y críticas de lo establecido (que no se desarrollan, ya que se pierden en digresiones).

Otra cuestión que destaco, por lo trunca, es que pienso que la mayoría de los argumentos de estos cuentos, contados de forma oral, atraparían a un posible lector; pero llevados a la escritura (a esta escritura) dejan de importar: tampoco me atrae demasiado el estilo de la prosa. Por todo esto, entre la nota alta de la comunidad lectora y mis ganas de que el libro me gustara (tenía esa expectativa previa muy presente), la experiencia terminó siendo una gran decepción.

Una anotación mía entre medio de la lectura que resume la crítica: "Lo surrealista se torna demasiado ortodoxo y se aleja de todo hilo narrativo para derivar en imágenes superpuestas, confusas, poco atractivas. Lo que en un cuadro (Leonora Carrigton me encanta como artista) se puede expresar con una totalidad bella, a lo largo de un relato está totalidad nunca llega a ser y leemos retazos que poco nos dicen, y pesadamente nos hacen perder el interés por lo que pueda suceder: puesto que todo indica que poco o nada terminará sucediendo; o al menos algo que nos resulte interesante."

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading through this collection is like wandering through a protracted dream that feels always just on the verge of spiraling into a nightmare. Finishing this collection is like waking up from that dream, the details of narrative evaporating instantaneously while the random assortment of unforgettable, deeply uncanny individual moments and images remain firmly lodged in the brain.

[Janelle Ramos · Rating 4 out of 5]

He disfrutado mucho estos cuentos, lo descriptivos que son, vas leyendo y sientes cómo que estás viendo a estos seres extraños, que ella describe,producto de su imaginación? dicen que estaban en sus sueños y te preguntas también: qué sueña esta mujer??
Con algunos cuentos me reí, pero con otros me sentí perturbada, tanto que tenía que tomar una pausa y hacer otra cosa porque si no también soñaba con esto. Amé las ilustraciones y mis favoritos fueron: La debutante, Un hombre enamorado, un cuento de hadas mexicano y Jemima y el lobo.