The Hearing Trumpet
Marian Leatherby is 92 years old, deaf, bearded, and living with her son's family in postwar Mexico when a friend gives her an ornate hearing trumpet. The trumpet lets her overhear her family deciding to send her to a religious rest home run by Dr. Gambit and his Christian sisterhood. Once installed in the home, Marian falls into a slow conspiracy involving an Abbess painted into a portrait, a missing Holy Grail, alchemical lore, a dwarf who poisons the breakfast porridge, and a planetary catastrophe that turns the world upside down. Carrington writes the whole book at the same calm pitch, and the surrealism drifts in by inches.
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A 92-year-old deaf woman is committed to a sinister religious rest home in Mexico and stumbles into an alchemical conspiracy in this surrealist cult classic from the 1950s.
The Hearing Trumpet was written by Leonora Carrington in the 1950s and 1960s and published in 1976. Carrington was a British-Mexican Surrealist painter and writer. The novel is widely admired by writers including Jeff VanderMeer and Olga Tokarczuk.
The Hearing Trumpet is short (around 200 pages) and stylistically clear, but takes wild surrealist turns including talking goddesses and esoteric symbolism. Most readers find it propulsive once they accept the dreamlike logic.
The Hearing Trumpet is 160 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Hearing Trumpet takes most readers 2 to 3 hours to finish.
The Hearing Trumpet is a standalone novel by Leonora Carrington, not part of a series.
The Hearing Trumpet is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.