The Stone Door

by Leonora Carrington

After the enthusiastic reception accorded The Hearing Trumpet ("This is the best book I've ever read." - Los Angeles Free Times ), Leonora Carrington has now released for publication an even more intense tale of fantasy and love. Written at the end of World War II and only now published in its original English edition, The Stone Door is an inspired, phantasmagoric journey into a wildly surreal world.

The novel is an omen, an incantation, and an adventure story rolled into one. Built in layers like a Chinese puzzle, it is the tale of two people, of love and the Zodiac and the Cabbalah, of Transylvania and Mesopotamia converging at the Caucasus, of a mad Hungarian King named Böles Kilary and of a woman's discovery of an initiatory code that leads to a Cyclopean obstacle, to love, self and awareness, to the great stone door of Kescke and beyond...

As impossible to describe as it is to put down, The Stone Door establishes once and for all that the author has no peer in the realms of fantasy or black humor.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Classics, Art, Literary Fiction, 20th Century, Surreal

118 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

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

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now is a perfect time to read this book. Let’s face it: Leonora Carrington was smarter than most of us. She saw all the connections in this world, and she offered her own view of how to heal the brokenness. Throughout all of her work, the fullness of her vision points toward what we are now experiencing. In the current political sphere, we hear the dry death rattle of white supremacist patriarchy as it breathes its last rasping breaths. The fear among the elites is palpable; they’ve been reduced to sowing chaos as a last ditch effort to distract from the fact that their time is up (finally). White christian men have been foisting their binary constructs upon us for centuries, but now the arm that holds the hammer is being bent back. The cracks in this façade of their own making have widened to the point where they cannot be ignored. At the heart of this book lies a glimpse of what glows inside from between those cracks—what the cowards have tried to cover up. Once fully exposed, its truth will scorch the sordid hypocrisy of those in power into ashes. Carrington defied binary interpretations of the world and the lives of all persons within it. She sought a world free of phallocentric control. Gender fluidity courses through this novel, and with fluidity comes equality by default. Equality is, of course, the worst imaginable threat to patriarchy, which relies on a rigid social hierarchy, binary gender roles, and unequal distribution of wealth to maintain its power. Its adherents are in a panic, as more people embrace the differences among us and refuse to accept a world without nuance. The question remains: which will collapse first—the power structure or the planet?

[Nate D · Rating 5 out of 5]

All stories are true.

Chronological, linear time is an invention, a convenience. History is simultaneous and instantaneous. Events unfold exist in parallel at every era and culminate in an event outside of perceived history itself, at a point existing exactly next to our idea of the progression of time. At this point, the divided male and female impulses of the universe are united, and the existing order will be overturned. All that is known will be destroyed. In destruction, only in destruction, renewal.

"Sweet chaos, [...] and out of the chaos a new chaotic order never before dreamed by man."

Seemingly distilled from centuries of gnostic, alchemical, and occult theory and tempered in the fires of lived experience, The Stone Door reads like the potent merging of fairy tale and heretical hermetic codex. It has the power and conviction of myth, the portentous personal imagery of surrealism, and a diamond-pure conceptual heart, flecked with incantatory insight and philosophical depth. It is an anarchic statement of refusal and the guide-stones of escape.

Leonora Carrington is the finest surrealist writer I know of, wise and iconoclastic and mordantly funny, and this is her best book. I don't generally hold to a lot of occult theology and whatnot, but here she's assembled something strange and personal and momentous from these esoteric materials. And despite its significance, this has the deft narrative elegance of storytelling in its purest forms (myths, fairytales -- which have always been significant, after all). It is uncanny, gripping, perfect.



Previously, I'd only read this in a shortened novella form that Carrington prepared in 1988 for publication in The Seventh Horse And Other Tales, but this, finally, is the complete original, unpublished since '77, with an additional fifty pages*. Perhaps Carrington viewed these bits as inessential later, but as a curious (obsessed) reader, they're an incredible addition. The truncated version maintains the obscure gestalt of the story, but the original allows far more development, a much more complete picture.

Context: in 1940 or so, while in Spain attempting to secure asylum for Max Ernst as the Nazis swept into France, Carrington suffered a breakdown that resulted in some months at a psychiatric hospital. As she was discharged, her family dispatched a servant to retrieve her to England, but instead she slipped away to America via the Mexican embassy in Lisbon. After some time in New York City and the expat surrealist scene there (Breton was there at the time), she completed her original arrangement, which involved moving to Mexico and marriage to ambassador, poet, and friend of Picasso's, Renato Leduc. Then, adrift in an unfamiliar country in the mid 1940s, she wrote her first novel.

She's here in the pages, bored and and despairing in a stifling marriage in Mexico city. It seems like the bits of journal here, even with their symbolic and arcane asides, are probably a relatively accurate impression of sensations and conditions under which this novel was composed.

For centuries, they dressed up love for easy digestion as a fat little boy with wings, pale blue bows, and anemic-looking flowers. behind this bland decoration Love snarled its rictus through the ages. With shrieks of adoration, it flung itself on human breasts, “to crush you, to suck your life away. I cannot drag my own weight over the crust of the earth, so you must carry me on your back so that in time you will be crippled with my weight.” These words are in every heart in the mating season.

Within the novel, though, the seeker's desperation leads her not to write, but much further afield, into the secret trajectories along which the universe is arranged, and by which it may be broken. In particular, we're first introduced to a certain house out of time, in which a trio of scientist-mystics have entered into a conflict whose ripples will organize much of the rest of the story. These ripples radiate in all directions, striking in and out of the entire panorama of history.

I alluded to this idea of non-linear time before, which informs not only the plot, but the elegant structure of the book, as events brush against eachother across ages and vast distances to push the action cohesively to its climax. This aspect, handled in a completely unique manner to anything else I've encountered, was one of the most notable reductions in the novella version: the novella is the story of two timelines rushing to meet eachother in a third, whereas the novel gives a sensation of a much denser network of interconnections.

Sometimes, when you search for something and finally find it, it is disappointment in light of the search. This book is not such a case. Instead, it is a fulfillment of every potential.

*The novella is about 68 pages, this is 118. Even considering that the type is slightly larger here, there's at least 50% more story that had been cut, with new episodes, characters, expansion of motifs.



(re-read January 2013: some details are clarified, others cast into new doubt. Always a favorite. I've also been looking up all the references I can run down, particularly dense in the diary sections, if anyone is curious.)

[Jack Tripper · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Cover of the just-released NYRB edition, with art by Carrington herself.)

This weird esoteric novella of dreams within dreams, occult magick, alchemy, divination, visions, and timey wimey shenanigans was nearly impossible for me to decipher, even though I was already familiar with the story thanks to the abridged version included in Carrington’s collection The Seventh Horse and Other Tales. But I didn’t let my confusion stop me from just allowing the otherworldly imagery and incantations to wash over me, putting me into an almost trancelike state that induced rather unsettling nightmares after I fell asleep reading it the other night.

The closest comparison I can think of would be Ithell Coulquhoun’s Goose of Hermogenes, as at no point in either story did I understand all the strange mystical dream and alchemical symbolism, but I dug them anyway. The introduction and afterword here did help clear things up a bit, but there’s no way I would have figured out what was happening on my own.

Maybe when my brain’s working a little better I’ll give it another go. For now I’ll just say that only those interested in taking a journey through increasingly odd and tripped-out dreamscapes need apply with this one.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not on my surrealist fiction a game here; I had a little trouble with the earlier sections with the multiply framed and nested narratives, and only hit my stride when the story coalesced around Zacharias and his travails and quest. But there's no shortage of elegantly rendered bizarre vignettes and turns of plot every few pages. No, I'm not about to follow Zacharias' prescription for making a pair of trousers.

[Joe M · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a strange, wonderful, wild ride. I won't pretend that I understood all of Carrington's symbology and mythological references here, but I'd put The Stone Door and The Hearing Trumpet up there with my favorite Studio Ghibli films in their ability to whisk you away to a magical world, stimulate the imagination, and take you on an otherworldly journey. 

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

some absolutely incredible imagery filtered through dream logic and obscure occult symbolism, although so hermetic that i did struggle to work out what the book was driving at. but that's ok

[Kyle C · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel begins like the set-up to a thriller: in the depths of a forest, canopied with foliage black as the hair of an Aztec priest, in a baroque mansion—Victorian style, neo-Gothic, Grecian but with Roman add-ons—three men meet. The first is Chinese, the second is European, the third is a Jew. Each of them has a microscope, a telescope, and a flower. Above them is a stone statue of a centaur. Their meeting point seems both like a villain's lair and an otherworldly laboratory. Already the novel is a surreal admixture of genres, forms and peple: the forest appears Mesoamerican, the house is a neo-classical bricolage, the men seem like delegates of an international cabal, and the centaur—a creature half man, half horse—gestures at the novel's hybridity and syncretism.

Their conversation suggests that something is awry in the world and the narrative takes an apocalyptic turn. It is the Jew who speaks first: "It will not do anymore," he says enigmatically. The other two say nothing. The Jew continues: "If I suck all the cows in Europe dry, we will not know anymore." It is a baffling statement (What will they not know anymore? And why does he need to drink milk?) The Chinese man and the European seemingly ignore the Jew. "We have seen war," replies the European. "The necessity of that is written in the arched parchment over our heads," explains the Chinese man. In an amusing shift of tone, sounding more like a parent scolding a child, the European turns and says to the Jew, "Drink your milk." The Jew retorts, "I am running dry. I must have a woman" and then adds in more mystical undertones, "If we ignore the door of the womb we shall shrivel and die."

As is hinted throughout the novel, the three men are protectors of the patriarchy. Their duty is to keep the stone door—leading to womanhood, to femininity, to the female unconscious dormant in women and men alike—closed and locked. According to the Chinese man, knowledge of this secret would unloose chaos on the universe. "No woman must ever learn more than the circle around her hearth," he explains, a misogynistic mantra of female domesticity. But the Jew believes that the womb, that femininity, must be freed in order to save mankind. What follows is a labyrinthine sequence of dreams, embedded stories, metempsychosis—the Jew is reincarnated several times over; he is born in Hungary and raised in an orphanage; he is plunged into the Danube and must flay the skin of a king to make a pair of trousers for a giant. In his dreams, he meets a girl, Amagoya, who herself also encounters him in her dreams; she reads about an earlier incarnation of him in a journal written, presumably, by one of her own past lives who had met him in a dream. It is an oneiric story of destined lovers separated by time and continents, a Möbius strip in which the two lovers have always been together with no start or end.

Of biographical relevance here, Leonora Carrington wrote this after her marriage to her second husband—a Hungarian-born Jewish man—and the novel on the surface level is an allegory of her life. But the novel cannot be reduced to mere biography. It is populated with archetypal scenes and mythic figures familiar from Leonora Carrington's art: a human-sized egg, a hermaphroditic child, flying horses, autopsy tables, alchemical experiments, hermetic rituals. Recognizable, too, from her short stories and from The Hearing Trumpet is the contrast between wild freedom and institutional prisons: a defiant wolf-girl girl flees home and howls at the moon, a boy is bound in bed in an orphanage and not even permitted to place his hands beneath his bedsheets to scratch his itchy legs (presumably because of fears of masturbation)—the real world is so cruelly oppressive that the two of them try to stay together in their dreams. The novel is set in a strange world: silly, even comic, like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but also scary and despotic. The geography and chronology of this world are strange: Moses has been 'blasted to bits', the king of the Jews in ancient Mesopotamia enjoys commerce with Mexico, the cosmos is grand in scale but, as in a dream, traversable and small.

Overall, a psychedelic novel but without the same whimsy and humor as her other works. It has a much clearer didactic thesis: ironically, the union of man and woman does not result in peace or romantic fulfillment. The future is not some Jungian utopia in which male and female are reconciled and integrated. Instead, the result is freedom, animals running wild, the world unfettered, and man subordinated to the chthonic forces of nature.

[Alana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Standing on one foot I am peeling back the layers of an infinite onion, book in hand. Lost in its precisely constructed confusions, these necessary and radium crystalline images make (non)sense of our intersubjective longings. Yearning born out of and covered in an afterbirth of delicate punning chaos, dripping with tender slime tendrils. Blood magic rituals are performed thrice, between moments of childhood prophesies, or adding red cabbage to your stew. Cracking the spines of texts with personal constellations of symbols that may be traced in the lines of soil on dirty hands and as far away as the stars on dark navy. That is, once you have learnt to listen and see both as true and ancient friends. Metaphysics should always be funny, soft, and terrifying.

This was worth all my years waiting. She is so primordial MOTHER.

[Christine · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't know. I found it to be trying too hard to be.

[birdbassador · Rating 5 out of 5]

my edition came with both an intro and an afterward, both of which attempted to describe the plot while also claiming that they didn't want to get bogged down in describing the hermeneutic and arcane symbolism, which to me is a sign that you've got A Winner on your hands

[Jake Slaughter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really sure what I just read but pretty cool imagery and every night after reading I had crazy dreams.

[Malaena · Rating 5 out of 5]

i’ve been sitting on this review! it’s hard to figure out what to say about a book that’s so far outside from what i normally gravitate too but that’s also what i like so much about the book club i’m in.

this book is WEIRD. it’s like taking an acid trip, or more aptly, like stepping into a surrealist painting which the author was herself. but i liked it! it felt like reading witch craft, or an oral tradition, a myth, a fairy tale, an incantation as the introduction said.

this book had me on the edge of its seat and pushed my expectations for what language can do with its descriptions and its imagination. books like this are why i’m so thankful to have book club because i would have never come across something like this without it, and its magical descriptions i know will make mine better by pushing me out of my comfort zone.

but in many ways, i also think my penchant for memoir and books of *this realm* sometimes hindered my reading. despite the introduction saying how this book collapses time and gender, i found myself after going back to see how they were being conflated. it really opened my eyes to how binary my ordinary thought process is subconsciously and maybe how that’s surreptitiously hindering my own relationship with the world. i know i have whimsy, but maybe i need more imagination.

and i think that’s precisely the point of this book, to question what you’ve been taught. to understand how time simply repeats itself, and question our role it in all. and for that, i think this book is a great read right now. more people need to be pushed outside their everyday thoughts. more people need to accept a world with nuance and unanswered questions. more people need defiance.

but despite that this book is so cerebral, it helped me get so out of my head.

[Hannah]

Would I have gotten any of the ideas discussed in the afterword without having to read it? No, probably not. But I did enjoy this- I kind of just went with the vibe and didn’t try to attach too much meaning to anything happening. ‘The Hearing Trumpet’ is still my favorite of hers, but this was a nice way to start my morning.

[Matt Croft · Rating 4 out of 5]

As much for the soul as it is for the mind. Much like her works of art it does not require understanding to appreciate its inherent wisdom and beauty.

[Matthew Calvert · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5) Vibrantly Fantastical, felt like a book straight out of a dream

[Terence]

6 out of 10

"Carrington's is a vision of gender and sexuality that resists binary thinking - of embracing difference without allowing it to serve a dividing or categorizing purpose." ("Afterword," Anna Watz)

[Nat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Arguably not at all the place to start with Leonora Carrington, but for 100 pages I’m down for anything. Rife with symbolism and nonsensical imagery, but thus is the nature of surrealism as far as I am aware. The second half was better for sure imo.
Reading reviews and responses have added to my experience with this one. Had more fun reading it than I thought I would.

[Estere]

This book reminded me of when I was losing my mind a bit in 2021.

I was having super intense, vivid dreams and I was convinced for a few hours after waking up (sometimes for much longer) that I must have a life in a parallel universe or something that I just visited by dreaming lol very similar to how it’s depicted here.

Anyways, I liked the narrative structure a lot. I think this completes the Leonora Carrington discography, can’t wait to read it all again. 💋

[Brett · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Stone Door is a highly experimental allegory about feminism and the union of man and woman, and when I say experimental, I mean it. The book is symbolic almost to the point of incomprehensibility, and even Leonora Carrington’s ultimate thesis remains shrouded in thick ambiguity. I think I understand Carrington’s point, and it’s a good one, but her symbolism was a little overpowering and her writing was not terribly engaging. Overall, I’d give this book 3 stars, but just barely.

To the best of my ability, this is the book’s plot in brief. A nameless young woman searches in her dreams for the reincarnation of an ancient king, accessible only by traveling through the land of the dead and unlocking a great stone door. Meanwhile, a young Hungarian man named Zacharias lives out his childhood in an orphanage/concentration camp and is penniless in the streets before discovering a great stone key. Driven by some unknown purpose, he leaves his world behind and departs into a swirling dreamscape where Hungary meets the Middle East and the world of myths, and he ultimately opens the stone door and unites (or reunites) with the woman.

The book’s thesis is unclear, but it seems to dwell on a disconnect between the pre-war status quo and a new, enlightened way of life. This can only be reached by departing from conventional beliefs like anti-Semitism or gender norms, and it is integrally related to our subconscious minds, but only by making this emotional/spiritual journey can we truly reach enlightenment and happiness.

This is a strong message, and to some extent, it’s expressed in a fascinating way. But most of the time, the plot is so convoluted that it’s dry and feels a little ridiculous to try and comprehend. The female part of the status quo dichotomy is somehow associated with the land of the dead, and that with ancient Mesopotamia and a mad Hungarian king. An amorphous, conscious egg is a principal character in both stories. Zacharias, as part of his quest to discover the stone door, must fashion a pair of pants from the dead king’s skin — and then that pair of pants expands and becomes the sail to a boat in an underground river that Zacharias must traverse. When he unlocks the stone door at last, he is met not with the woman of his dreams, but with a herd of sheep that nervously rush away from him. Perhaps there is meaning in all of these images, but as a whole, they feel a little far-fetched and superfluous to Carrington’s main argument.

Ultimately, I still give this book 3 stars. Its moral is a solid one, and its subconscious emphasis is an important post-modern technique for finding meaning in the world post-World War 2. But this was not an easy book to get through, despite its slim size, and I didn’t find it to be very engaging or emotionally stimulating. Thus, I would only recommend this book to fans of this particular style of surrealistic, Jungian narrative.

[Will · Rating 1 out of 5]

As put perfectly by one 'anonymous reviewer,' it's a "surreal fantasy of exasperating self-importance, only occasionally redeemed by a flash of wit or pungency . . .. Despite much portentous manipulation of lofty symbols, this is an extraordinarily vapid and tedious exercise."

[MountainAshleah · Rating 2 out of 5]

NYRB Monthly Book Selection. This was a misstep on NYRB's part, especially on the heels of the excellent surrealist work, Nadja. There's a place for pieces like The Stone Door, particularly in academia, or canonical studies, history courses, gender studies, or the like. (For me, reading this novel brought back unwelcome images of mandatory women's studies courses at university.) A watery Introduction by the author's son bolstered by a jargon-saturated Afterwards isn't a nod to the novel's slight length, but its slight content. When we remove social and historical context, publication circumstances, and the author's fascinating biography and artistic career, there isn't much left. It's just a silly, flighty journey of a solipsistic soul, littered with sparkling but fundamentally inconsequential objects, to which academics and others layer meaning, or attempt to do so. All while ignoring elements such as the uncomfortable food obsessions (count not only references to food, but also the number of references to FAT characters), ableism (the club footed character, for one), racism (the opening chapter alone sounds like the start of a bad joke), and the rather disturbing references to a sort of Silence of the Lambs thematic. So the reader wanders around, applying meaning (or not), noticing startling images, and so on. But ultimately, not being left with much at the book's conclusion and closing, although I do like the cover painting. To put it kindly, the summary of the reading experience, in the author's own words: "As I walked slowly along the road I examined these rich heaps of rubbish, stopping now and again to root about, putting anything that happened to please me in my sack." I can understand, with its gendered theme, its selection for the book club, but there needs to be more substance and less requirement for a decoder ring. A book of metaphors only goes so far, at least with this instance (Carrington isn't Joyce or Morrison). However, if you read the final encounter with the stone door and its bizarro scene as a metaphor for the sexual act, with the stone door not as gender-metamorphosis but as hymen barrier, the ending of the text is weirdly entertaining. And to the last sentence on the page I added, "Forever chasing tail."

[Hetian bias · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love you NYRB classics I love you sorry about it……first of all why did it take me this long to realize she’s an Aries……and she was an ~Aries~ mystic (Liz Franczak voice) and second of all I am so truly and exponentially on my fucking ass….I reread the first twenty pages four times (110 page novel more richly dense than a dictionary) I told you on my ass I swear to you I was……I was given the story within the dream within the journal within the third person narrator within the book…..the chokehold this dead woman has on my psychological underpinnings not to mention the secrets of the universe……..this will require an annual reread….for it cannot simply be read, it must be studied, experienced, submitted to….out beyond right doing and wrong doing there is a field….Rumi said so……Rumi to Leonora pipeline….is that even fucking correct or is that insane to say…..LET ME IN LET ME IN STONE DOOR

[Alexandria · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Hardly daring to touch what I want to say, yet knowing if I had enough space around me it would be a piercing shriek. White, long, sharp as the crack of a whip.

This is the love letter to a nightmare."

[Emily M · Rating 3 out of 5]

not the NYRB book club giving me super advanced surrealism when all I had read of the genre up to this point was goddamn Kafka, some Lispector, and Waiting for Godot. Got rekt. Will try to reread when I have more experience with Weird Shit.

[Diana Ericksen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️ absolutely fascinating and imaginative. I’ve never read anything like it.

[Saskia Blake · Rating 5 out of 5]

horses everywhere

[Shea · Rating 4 out of 5]

"They knew each other so well now it was becoming obscene. What demon made them walk so easily in and out of each other's private minds, stealing thoughts before they were even formulated? He found it irritating."

This is a text so rich and layered that upon finishing my initial reading I immediately wish to return to it. The story here is not at all simple to parse through, it's a bit like looking into one of Carrington's paintings. Everything is so vivid and bizarre it is unclear where one should begin yet each piece belongs, undeniably, together. Though the question remains, in what way exactly?

I believe this could be five stars for me upon future readings and I'm excited to revisit this work in context with the rest of Carrington's body of work as well as with the "French Feminist Movement" of the 70s that it was first published (though not originally conceived) in. I love when books make me so eager to think about new ideas and how people experience reality!!!! Yes!!!

[Lucy Owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

You know what, hell yeah!

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting as a document of its time and of surrealist literature, with some beautifully evocative passages. However, it is a bit *too* of its time to recommend for general readers.

I will probably read it again as a physical book, which I expect will help me get more out of it.

[Zoe Lask · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not my favorite Carrington but still a good time. Lots of good talking points. Maybe the best afterward I’ve ever read.