Weird and wonderful. These stories feel like surreal dreams of dark fairy tales. Carrington's tales are imaginative, funny, disturbing, and sprinkled with some whimsically symbolic social commentary regarding class and society that sadly is as applicable today as it was in the 1930s. I enjoy absurd aesthetics, but I also love powerfully meaningful stories - this book has both. ( )

This collection of stories is easily the weirdest book I have ever read. Leonora Carrington was long associated with the painter Max Ernst. Fittingly, her stories are classified as surrealistic fiction and merge the boundaries between people and animals. Despite the weirdness, they are very engrossing and several remain with you for a long while after the book is finished. ( )

The Complete Stories of Leonara Carrington
by Leonara Carrington
Translated from French by Katherine Talbot
Translated from Spanish by Anthony Kerrigan
2017
Dorothy, a publishing project
5.0/5.0

Carringtons novels have come to epitomize surrealism,and really there is no other way to explain this brilliant, strange and absorbing stories. This includes all her short stories, some a bit autobiographical, but all of them haunting. I first found her through her surreal art work. Amazing.

Favorites include:

The Debutante

A Man In Love

The Three Hunters

White Rabbits ( )

Some of the most remarkable short stories I've ever read: surrealistic fairy tales that are atmospheric, eerie, and sublime. The images are fantastic, word-paintings of strange worlds where animals speak, the unspeakable is eaten, and characters transform from people, to animals, to corpses and other inanimate objects. A feast to be sipped and savored! ( )

“Do you believe that the past dies?”
“Yes, if the present cuts its throat.”

The form is fables, folk and fairy tales; the feel is fantastical, dream-like, surreal (in the original sense, per André Breton, as behind or beneath sensory consciousness, where lies the ominous and the absurd). These stories are weird and wild like Carrington’s paintings—there are equine homunculi with vulgar passions, spooky soothsaying birds, a fountain full of stupefied bees and allusions to Alfred Jarry (‘Mr. MacFrolick offered me a china dish on which rested his own moustache’). A family of hunters, cursed ever after a grandfather broke wind during his first communion ceremony, displays its trophies in a long lamp-lit gallery ‘consisting only of sausages: sausages in aquariums, sausages in cages, sausages hanging on the walls, sausages in sumptuous glass boxes.’ Carrington was a connoisseur of eccentric collections and the frisson of contraries—verdant decay, exhausted innocence, the mundane miraculous.

About a hundred yards from the Church of Saint Alexander there was what he called “my garden of the little Flowers of Mortification.” This consisted of a number of lugubrious instruments half buried in the earth: chairs made of wire (“I sit in them when they’re white-hot and stay there until they cool off”); enormous, smiling mouths with pointed, poisonous teeth; underwear of reinforced concrete full of scorpions and adders; cushions made of millions of black mice biting one another—when the blessed buttocks were elsewhere.

Most of the stories were written in the late 1930s & early 1940s but seem to come from a timeless wellspring. The handful of stories composed from the 1950s onward more often refer (if only obliquely) to the contemporaneous world and are less cryptic and more satirical.

The Head of the Psychoanalytical Association, Dr. Siegried Laftnalger, received the gift of the Rats in the shadow of the monument to Semi-Applied and Metaphorical Science. This monument, recognized around the world as unique, consists of three heroes and a horse triumphantly penetrating a streptococcus culture. ( )