Book Review: "The Hearing Trumpet" by Leonora Carrington

A book about the mundane human life of living to old age and then being shoved into a facility. A 92-year-old woman who believes she is perfectly capable of living on her own is admitted to an institution where she observes that everyone has given up in the name of weird cult-like religious sermons and living in igloo-style houses. Whilst she gets to know her institution, she also gets to know the Abbess’s story. It is one of adventure and trouble, mischief and love. Renewing her sense of life in this mundane living facility may be difficult, but the book slipped to her about the Abbess seeks to save her.

A great quotation from the book is:

“You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It's not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can't even remember your name.”

This is a great quotation because it represents the way in which life can be enlightened and life can be put out in an instant. It is ‘magical’ but at the same time it is also ‘dramatic’. Life and death are both dramatic, but the act of ‘fading away’ is just so existential it is unreal. I read this quotation over and over again until I could finally move on.

The next quotation I moved on to was this one:

“Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.”

This makes me think of two other books, “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson in which the house has its own personality and “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell in which death and flesh are always interconnected in this eternal spiral of life and the flesh will eventually die out but the rest is eternal.

The various comments on the outside world in this book is amazing. They have this weird creepy conspiracy vibe about the other people who live normal lives but I actually believe that the facility is a microcosm for society itself. Just check out what they have to say about governments and parliament etc. here:

“It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves 'Government!' The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy."

"It has been going on for years," I said. "And it only occurred to relatively few to disobey and make what they call revolutions. If they won their revolutions, which they occasionally did, they made more governments, sometimes more cruel and stupid than the last."

"Men are very difficult to understand," said Carmella. "Let's hope they all freeze to death. I am sure it would be very pleasant and healthy for human beings to have no authority whatever. They would have to think for themselves, instead of always being told what to do and think by advertisements, cinemas, policemen, and parliaments.”

There is something really downright horrible about this quotation but also makes you think about the way difference is perceived and hated. How the way in which conspiracy theories are thought up and the way in which hatred towards others plays out is something violent because there is nobody to police what is considered to be ‘hate speech’.

In conclusion, I will honestly say the book was a satirical, funny and deep. But the very best thing about the book is that it teaches us that life is not really over when we think it is. There is always something new, there is always something left to discover and there is always a reason to live even in the most mundane circumstances ever. It was one of those books that will keep your mind turning long after it is finished.